VOLUME 7, NUMBER 4

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change

F E AT U R E A R T I C L E SManaging Your Time
as a Leader
Marilyn PaulDavid Peter Stroh

EMERGING KNOWLEDGE

Systems Intelligence:
A Key Competence
for Organizational Life
Raimo P. Hämäläinen
Esa Saarinen

Teaching Organizational
Learning: Permission
to Exhale
Phil Ramsey

Context Tension: Cultural
Influences on Leadership andManagement Practice
Nadine Mendelek Theimann
Kurt April
Eddie Blass

BOOK EXCERPT

Conscious BusinessFred Kofman

PHOTOS.COM

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

PUBLISHER’S NOTE 7.3

In this last issue of the year, we present a selection ofarticles that offer practical applications and report on work that is pushing theedge of what we recognize as personal and collective learning disciplines.
Our feature story is most apropos to the time of year – I write this while hoping
to check many things off my year-end to do list. You may be reading it at about
the same time, or perhaps as you are sitting back and reflecting on what the coming year holds in store. In either case, reviewing “Managing Your Time as a
Leader,” by Marilyn Paul and David Peter Stroh is certainly a good use of yourC. Sherry Immediatotime. Marilyn, author of It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find
Your Keys: The Seven-Step Path to Becoming Truly Organized, joins her husband,
business partner, and SoL member David in capturing the basic implications of their work for effective leadership. You may have seen a recent Harvard Business Review article addressing the symptom of
overworked executives, which reported that working long hours and traveling between multiple timezones result in the equivalent of decisions made under the effect of too many martinis. Paul and Stroh areclear that this is a symptom of faulty assumptions that cause us to work more, achieve less, and create aripple of ineffectiveness in the organizations we manage. They urge us to stop addressing the symptoms
and start addressing the causes of working more and achieving less. Two of their key points are recognizing how to increase sustainable productivity, and reducing phantom workload. Their artful use ofcreative tension to frame their lessons and practical techniques is a great application of organizational
learning fundamentals.
This issue also includes three Emerging Knowledge Forum articles from contributors around theworld.
By its very label, “systems thinking” can imply that an appreciation of systems is a mental activity.
Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Esa Saarinen, of Helsinki University of Technology in Finland propose that ourability to comprehend systems is a complex intelligence involving multiple senses, and sense making thatis in itself quite complex. In “Systems Intelligence: A Key Competence in Human Action and Organizational
Life” they usefully ask us to consider how it is we are able to function effectively in complex systems,
particularly if we understand this competence as intelligent behavior that can be further developed. Somewould say that this is the premise of Senge’s contribution to the field of organizational learning. Regardless,we would benefit from clear research questions to help develop this intelligence. We look forward toreader comments on this work.
“Context Tension: Cultural Influences on Leadership and Management Practice” points out that therealities of globalization tend to result in Western-based businesses imposing their values and management
practices on those in the developing world. The authors – Nadine Mendelek Theimann, University of
Oxford; Kurt April, University of Cape Town and Ashridge; and Eddie Blass, University of Hertfordshireand Ashridge – focus on the African context and note that the strength of African culture makes suchhomogenization both ineffective and impractical. At the same time, the necessity of cross-regional business
relationships, as well as a history of colonialism, mean a rejection of Western practices is equally unworkable. The authors propose the possibility of hybrid management systems honoring both traditions rather
than trying to co-opt or improve either. They offer a well-researched comparison of regional management

ii Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

PUBLISHER’S NOTE continued

values and practices that the casual reader is likely to find a useful window on the challenges and opportunities of globalization. We hope researchers continue to offer questions and evidence around culture
context and its relevance to organizational learning.
For the past ten years, Phil Ramsey, of Massey University in New Zealand, has had the intention ofteaching organizational learning by engaging his students in creating their own learning organization. In“Teaching Organizational Learning: Permission to Exhale” he notes that a more traditional mode oftransferring knowledge (inhaling) should be complemented with providing the opportunity for “learners
to experience the exhilaration of organizational learning” in the educational process (exhaling). We hopethat Ramsey’s article will create an important new thread of contributions to Reflections about organizational learning in the university classroom – including exchanges of syllabi and course materials, teaching
techniques, and advice about how to experiment within a traditional university setting.
Finally, this issue’s book excerpt from Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values takes
a comprehensive view about how we can bring more of ourselves to work. The book’s author, Fred
Kofman, was an early member of the staff of SoL’s predecessor, the MIT Center for Organizational
Learning. Because Ken Wilber has aspired to a rather thorough definition of what consciousness means to
the individual in a collective context, we have chosen to reprint his foreword. It provides a brief and accessible summary of his own work, while offering a good introduction to the whole idea of conscious business – something that we can correctly conclude is currently the exception rather than rule.
As Paul and Stroh began, is it any wonder in all our rushing around that consciousness is the casualty?
Fortunately, we can choose otherwise. We hope that this issue provides an opportunity for some quiet
moments of awareness of your own gifts – those that you offer and those you receive. We appreciate theopportunity your commitment to collective intelligence and wisdom creates for all of us to engage ininquiry and conversations that matter.
With best wishes for deep contentment in the New Year,

C. Sherry Immediato
Managing Director, SoL

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Write iii
n Immediato
Publisher’s NoteReaders

READERS WRITE 7.4

A S t r u g g le f o r S u stai n ability i n R u ssia
The story of the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD) in Vladivostok
and its founding by its students and their teachers is a story of entrepreneurial spirit and hope (Reflections
7.3). Reading Jeffrey Lindstrom’s article makes you want to get up and change educational institutions.
It is the story of connecting an idea with an intention. And it immediately raises a comparison with thelife of students in most educational institutions today. What better learning experience could there bethan creating your own curriculum and learning environment, one that allows students to succeed andcontribute to their own community?
One challenge, as they identified, will be how this new way of learning and teaching will survive ina larger system that is stuck in the past. The example of unprepared professors showing up late for theexams at ISD is a reflection of that challenge. Another possible future challenge for ISD might beharder to address: When the ISD moves from its initial entrepreneurial phase to conducting its everyday
business, will it continue to provide such an exciting learning environment for its students? Will the next
generation of students have a chance to create or co-create their curriculum as well?
I saw three outstanding lessons from Lindstrom’s story of ISD’s founding:1)	Students thrive when they take responsibility for creating their own curriculum and learning
environment.
2)	The sustainability award created by the students points to the importance of connecting thecurriculum and the students’ work with their community, and with the larger reality beyond
the educational institution.
3)	The underlying purpose of the Institute, sustainability, unites students and the supporterof ISD because it connects to an objective beyond individual interests.
These are lessons that could be applied in many other contexts.
Katrin Käeufer
kaeufer@MIT.EDU

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F E AT U R E 7 . 4

Managing Your Time as a Leader
Marilyn Paul and David Peter Stroh

M

Marilyn PaulDavid Peter Strohany leaders feel starved for time. Working under the assumption that longer hours
lead to improved productivity, they drive themselves and others to increase effectiveness – then try to “squeeze in” good, quality time with loved ones. Working
people are expected to run at a fast pace and be highly productive; yet at the same time, there
is a chronic sense of individual and collective slippage, less than optimal work performanceand impending burnout.
The ability of leaders to manage the increase in both workload and burnout more effectively is essential because their behavior has significant impact on others. Recent studies
confirm that under stress, people act more defensively, make poorer decisions, and literally
lose the “executive” function of their minds.1 This is especially costly for leaders because they
set the tone for their organizations. Their moods affect how others think and behave, so thatpeople around them also tend to react in confused, defensive, and otherwise unproductive
ways.2
When we ask our clients what they know about how to manage time, they list many familiar approaches: set goals, plan ahead, delegate, track commitments to ensure work is completed, and create manageable “to do” lists.3 When we ask if they use these tools, we get oneof two answers:
1.	We do all these things, and they are not sufficient for us to stay on top of the demands
we face, or
2.	We know we should do these things, but we don’t have time to do them
Conventional approaches to time management are useful in organizing to get work done.
However, increasing personal efficiency alone is inadequate for helping leaders resolve thiskey strategic issue: how to achieve high levels of sustainable, long-term performance while
meeting the challenge of doing more with less. Powerful workplace dynamics lead people,
individually and collectively, to spend large amounts of their work time pursuing non-productive activities. Leaders must understand the nature of these dynamics and what they can do
to change individual and collective habits of action.
The purpose of this article is to help leaders at all levels update their approach to time
management to better address the challenges of today’s work world. The key elements of thisnew approach are:
1.	A focus on sustainable productivity
2. Identification and reduction of “phantom workload” – the work people unwittingly
create for themselves by taking short cuts around or trying to avoid essential, difficulttasks
3.	Tools for managing time more effectively in four leadership domains

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Feature n Paul, Stroh 4.	A behavioral change model that enables people to reliably put good time management
ideas – both traditional and innovative – into sustainable practice.

Increasing Sustainable Productivity
Perhaps the most important assumption for leaders to question is that working harder –longer hours and more days in a year – increases productivity. It’s a seductive proposition,
because working harder works up to a point – and beyond that point the personal consequences include reduced brain functioning, increased stress and health problems, decreased
effectiveness, and strained or failed relationships. The impact on teams and units
isalso great: overwork tends to lead to mistakes that result in poor quality
Experienceand re-work; misunderstandings and unnecessary conflict; lack of innovation;shows that timeand extensive, unproductive meetings. The impact of overwork is sometimes
is not something clear and sometimes subtle – but it is insidious, leading to a long-term decline inquality of life.
that can be
Bill, a senior manager at a major pharmaceutical company, worked long hours
saved; it can only to keep up with his assignments, which included leading several global teams
be “spent” more developing market research projects. He enjoyed being the expert who wasneeded by people across the globe and tried to make himself available to his color less wisely.
leagues. He prided himself on putting in long hours at work and being available
at home. But when Marilyn met him, he was in the middle of a brutal divorce
and under scrutiny by his boss. He felt pulled in many directions and had trouble focusing
on the essence of his responsibilities. He also had difficulty showing the leadership his department needed and was known as an uneven and unreliable manager. Some days he would beremote and unavailable; on others he would be chatty and even long-winded. Because he wasso stretched, he let his subordinates run for a long time without supervision. Then, when hecaught up on his sleep or reduced his backlog, he would take a look at what had happened
without him. Surprised or even shocked by what he saw, he would plunge in with a fine-tooth
comb – aggravating his subordinates and creating resentment that he hadn’t been more present earlier. Sensing the resentment, he would back off and the uneven management cycle
would repeat.
The costs of his uneven behavior were high, but he had difficulty saying no to requests forhis expert advice. If he was going to survive at the company, he would have to deeply restore
his energy, learn to set clear priorities, and even out his managerial behavior.
Leaders need to think in terms of increasing not simply levels of work and productivity,
but primarily the level of sustainable productivity. By sustainable productivity we mean:• Getting the right things done, well, in a timely way, and• Preserving and restoring resources including oneself, one’s good standings withcolleagues and customers, and one’s relationships with family, community, and thenatural environment
Experience shows that time is not something that can be saved; it can only be spent moreor less wisely. One way to approach this is to clarify what really matters to us, live life inaccordance with our deepest values, and serve others’ best interests as well as our own. Froma leader’s point of view, time management needs to be about helping oneself and others makewise and often courageous choices rather than doing more with less.

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Reducing Phantom Workload
One of the best ways to increase sustainable productivity is to reduce what we call “phantom
workload.” Phantom workload is the unintentional work created when people either take
expedient, but ineffective short cuts or avoid taking on such essential, difficult tasks as:4
•	Clarifying mission, vision, and values•	Asking questions that challenge what is ambiguous or unrealistic• Identifying and resolving conflicts•	Clarifying and streamlining decision-making processes•	Providing candid, constructive feedback• Differentiating people with sanctions and rewards•	Launching innovative projects• Making decisions that require disinvestment in programs or projects
The consequences of phantom workload include re-work, upset customers, chronic organizational conflict, lengthy unproductive meetings, time wasted solving the same problem
over and over again, and extensive signoffs. Phantom workload looks and feels real andunavoidable, yet it can add hours to daily workload without significant benefit. Leaders
unwittingly create a vicious cycle where the workload produced by solving these additional
problems leads to increased pressure, which in turn leads to greater stress and a further reluctance or inability to engage in difficult tasks (see Figure 1).

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Feature n Paul, Stroh In one case, the sponsor of a new project in a major oil company decided not to attend the
project’s two-hour kickoff meeting. He had other tasks to attend to, and he wanted toempower his project manager to take charge from the very beginning. However, the meeting
did not go well because the project team members from different parts of the company could
not agree on the project’s goals, decision-making processes, and accountabilities. The sponsor
subsequently spent 120 hours working with different departments andAs we face theindividuals to resolve the ambiguities and conflicts – 60 times longer thanthe original meeting!
tasks we typically
In another example, the clinical informatics group of a major healthavoid, we strengthen care company found itself caught in a dynamic of over-promising andunder-delivering to its internal customers. The group’s management recogourselves to makenized that it had two ways of dealing with this performance pressure: set
hard decisions, facerealistic expectations with customers or make commitments it was not surethe group could deliver on. Setting realistic expectations was difficult
difficult people andsituations with more because customers themselves experienced intense pressure to improve
short-term business results, the company was highly decentralized, and thegrace, and stop
innovative work the group did was difficult to scope. By contrast, promising a lot was easier, created customer excitement, and gave group members
ducking what needs
inspiring goals. Moreover, every once in a while, with a huge push, theto be addressed.
group did in fact “pull a rabbit out of the hat.”
Avoiding the difficult task of setting realistic expectations, which required ruthless portfolio as well as project planning, resulted in unintended consequences that increased performance pressure even further. First, the group was under continuous stress to meet generally
unrealistic expectations. Since they often hurried to complete projects, they created numerous
bugs in their product releases that had to be fixed. This led to even less time for planning andmaking accurate time estimates. They also had to negotiate customer pressures as delays
Figure 1. Phantom Workload

Avoidanceand Expedience(Shortcuts)

Problems Createdby Avoidance andExpedience

A VICIOUS
CYCLE

Stress,Reactivity

Phantom
Workload

Pressue toAchieve Results
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Figure 2. Over-promising and Under-delivering
Delivery
Shortfalls

delay
Credibility with
Customers

OverPromising

VICIOUS CYCLE

VICIOUS CYCLEQUICK FIX

Willingness to
Set Unrealistic
Expectations

Additional Work
(Bugs, Scope
Creep)
Performance
Pressures

VICIOUSCYCLE

Willingness to
Set Realistic
Expectations

On-Time Deliveryof Quality Products
F U N D A M E N TA LRESPONSE

Time to Plan

delay

delay

Ability to Set
Realistic
Expectations

mounted. When customer frustration increased, the group’s credibility decreased, further
undermining its ability to recalibrate its customers’ unrealistic expectations. Moreover fatigue
and discouragement increased along with stress, decreasing the group’s creativity and overall
work effectiveness even further (see Figure 2).
The important tasks that leaders avoid tend to be difficult, unpleasant, or anxiety-provoking. Therefore, addressing phantom workload as a way to manage time calls upon people toconfront what is difficult. It requires leaders to go beyond doing current tasks differently toaddress what they are not doing. Whether they call the tendency “avoidance,” “procrastination,” or simply “not getting around to it,” leaders need to take a hard look at the tasks theyleave unattended before deciding that the benefits of not doing them exceed the costs. Thus,“time management” becomes leadership development. As we face the tasks we typically
avoid, we strengthen ourselves to make hard decisions, face difficult people and situations
with more grace, and stop ducking what needs to be addressed.

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Feature n Paul, Stroh Managing Time in Four Domains
Strategizing

Guiding

Doing

Relating

DomainMentalSpiritual

Material

Emotional

FunctionThinkstrategically

Mobilize commitment throughaspiration

Organize foractionBuild relationships
and community

Primary Tasks• Defining
limited goals• Managing
tradeoffs• Making accurate
time estimates• Knowing what
you really careabout
• Establishinga meaningful
purpose• Clarifying
your uniquecontributions• Sorting andfiling information• Tracking
commitments• Managing email• Making
commitments
and requests• Managing
productive
meetings• Managing yourenergyManaging Time in Four Domains
It is helpful to think of time management in four domains. These domains represent thespiritual, mental, emotional and physical realms, which correspond to four key functions ofleadership: mobilizing commitment, thinking strategically, building relationships and community, and organizing for action. The sidebar (above) describes these functions and theirrelated time management tasks.
Effective leaders must deliver in all four areas, personally or indirectly through people they
support. We often generate phantom workload in the areas in which we are weakest, sincethese are where we tend to avoid the tasks that need to be done. Developing or even getting
support for weaknesses does not always come naturally to people who achieve on the basisof one or two strengths. For example, Jack Welch was promoted to CEO at GE because of
his extraordinary ability to get things done. Even during his early tenure his reputation toclear out unproductive work and entire businesses earned him the nickname “Neutron Jack.”
However, over time Welch came to realize that leading GE required him to focus as much on
values as results. He cited that a turning point in transforming the company occurred when
he made the controversial decision to fire managers who were getting results but failing topractice the organization’s new values.

Mobilizing Commitment
According to researchers Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, high performing managers
demonstrate high degrees of both focus and energy. Their resulting strong sense of purpose
enables them to apply their limited time to greatest advantage.5 They draw on their purposefulness to sort through the multiple demands on their time and target a few key contributions
they want to make.
By contrast, people who don’t have enough time to get things done often find themselvesin a reactive mode. Disconnected from their sense of purpose and values, they are more easily driven by what others want from them than by their own innate sense of direction. In aworld where there is always too much to do, their lack of clear personal purpose leaves themvulnerable to trying to do it all. As a result, they are often unfocused and confused.

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Bruch and Ghoshal’s research provides support for managers who long to live life directedby an inner compass rather than holding their finger to the wind. Knowing what one deeply
cares about is different from knowing what one likes to do; indeed, being true to one’s purpose often provides the motivation to take essential but difficult actions. Engaging our senseof purpose is a practice, not a one time event. We may have to keep asking the questions,“What do I really care about? What do I stand for? What matters most to me?”
Having done the hard and rewarding work of tapping into their own sense of purpose,
effective leaders both intuit and shape a shared purpose that unites their organizations. As
leaders guide people in their organizations to articulate shared values, mission, and vision,
they “save” time later by clarifying the guiding ideas that underpin decision-making throughout the organization.6
Knowing your purpose and the goals of your organization enables you to identify theunique contributions you can make. These contributions leverage your passion and talents inthe few places where you can have the greatest impact given the needs and direction of theorganization. It becomes your navigational system, helping you respond to the excessive
demands, tantalizing opportunities, inevitable crises, and frequent interruptions that can soeasily distract you from your path.

Thinking Strategically
Clarifying the unique contribution you want to make enables you to set a limited number ofgoals. Purposeful managers tend to work towards 1–3 goals at a time, and discipline theirdirect reports to do the same.7 Limiting goals can seem risky for leaders concerned about
missing opportunities or pursuing the wrong direction. However, proliferating goals often
substitute for sound strategic thinking, conflict resolution, andtough decision-making. The resulting ambiguity, confusion, andPeople who don’t havechronic conflicts are costly. Overwork, resentment, mistrust,enough time to get thingsand burnout are among the highest costs.
Leaders who know the few goals they want to pursue are bet- done often find themselves
ter prepared to manage tough tradeoffs, for example between:• Short-term vs. long-term• Urgent vs. important• Easy vs. difficult• Comfortable vs. unpleasantin a reactive mode and are
more easily driven by what
others want from them thanby their own innate senseof direction.

These tradeoffs are tough because we often prefer the left
hand column. Ironically, many managers report that they never
have time to do what they believe they should focus on – whether that be planning, supporting others, or evaluating performance. From this vantage point, sticking with priorities often
becomes an act of courage and pattern breaking, even character building. Stephen Covey’s
time management book First Things First, makes much of addressing the long-term important, versus the short-term urgent. To develop the skills to address the right hand column, we
ask slightly different questions as we decide where to focus:• What am I avoiding?
• What feels most urgent and compelling, yet might not actually be so very
important?

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Feature n Paul, Stroh • What essential tasks have I “not gotten around to” for the past several 		days, or weeks, or months?
• Who am I blaming for their part in not getting something important 			done? What is my role in that?
Raising awareness of the right-hand column can lead to additional questions that help
people focus on what they have been avoiding that is truly important:

One manager said,“In our company wenever have time to
do it right, but wealways have time
to do it over.”1. What specifically are you avoiding? Why?
2. What are the consequences of avoiding this? How important is it really?
3. What is your goal for addressing it?
4. What is the first step you intend to take? By when?
5. What is the second step you intend to take? By when?
6. Who will you ask for support?

Since accurate time estimates can be pivotal in not only the success of a project but also the satisfaction of those involved, making them is an essential partof setting priorities and planning. To do so, we build on prior experience;learn how to include such hidden factors as collaboration time, transitiontime, and dealing with unforeseen obstacles; and create a buffer for “surprises.” These guidelines can help:• Surface and challenge internal and external pressures to under-estimate how longthings will take
• Include time for preparation, collaboration, transition and completion in yourestimates• Allow for unforeseen circumstances – set personal deadlines well in advance ofactual ones to ensure sufficient buffer time
• Use backcasting as a planning tool
Often people say that it is not culturally acceptable to tell the truth about how long a
project takes. However, identifying the costs of under-estimating time can bolster the courage
to develop better estimates up front. One manager said, “In our company we never have time
to do it right, but we always have time to do it over.” That is the essence of phantom workload, and good time estimates can reduce it substantially.

Building Relationships
Trust and respect are the coin of the realm in today’s increasingly networked organizations.8
Establishing clear priorities, managing difficult trade-offs, and effectively predicting how longthings take all help build trust. The ability to make reliable commitments reduces the domino
effect produced by missed deadlines, where one person’s failure to deliver on time undermines
others’ abilities to do the same. It also eliminates the need for people to take time away fromtheir own commitments to help complete someone else’s work, which is a time-waster andrelationship-killer all in one.
No matter how important reliability is, in some organizations it is hard for people to keep
their word. Requests to do additional work come frequently and in many forms: as demands,
interruptions, crises, and opportunities.
Being true to yourself and your word requires the willingness and courage to resist saying“Yes” when a request takes you away from your chosen goals, or you are not sure you can Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

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deliver. Saying “No” is not perceived as an
option in many organizations. Moreover, toplease others, people often accept ambiguous or
unrealistic requests. Clarifying the nature of therequest can be construed as not being cooperative or a team player. For example, several members of the clinical informatics group believed:• “I am not allowed to push back. We
know programmers don’t code 6 hours
per day, but that’s what we budget for.”• “Client expectations are totally out of
our control.”Furthermore, in organizations that value
busyness over effectiveness, challenging others
to keep their word can be equally unpopular.
How do we hold people accountable for beinglate on a project or to a meeting when we know
how stretched we all are?
Despite the temptations to say “Yes” torequests, it helps to buy time first to consider
the following:
1. Is meeting the request congruent withyour personal intentions, skills, andresources?
2. If the requested work does not directly
support your goals, does it build sufficient social capital that enables you to be
successful in the ways you choose?
3. Is this a SMART request?9• S Specific: the details are clear• M Measurable: one understands the requester’s standards• A Attainable: the request is achievable• R	 Realistic: one can meet the request• T Time-limited: there are clear dates for completion and mid-course correction
The following questions further support the hard work of making effective agreements:•	When and with whom do you feel that you cannot take the time to clarify the natureof the request?
•	When and with whom do you over-commit (Clients, colleagues, bosses)?
•	What beliefs and thinking patterns lead you to take on ambiguous work that you are
not sure you can deliver on?
Finally, it is important to note that there are options between responding to a request with an
unqualified “Yes” or “No.” Sometimes, the most responsible answer – one that best honors
the other person’s needs as well as your capacity – might be to:reflections.solonline.org

Feature n Paul, Stroh •	Ask for clarification; ensure you receive a SMART request•	Offer to check your resources and get back to the requester in a specified amountof time• Make a counter-offer that you believe can still meet the requester’s needs•	Clarify the tradeoffs you see and jointly problem-solve an alternative
The flip side of making reliable commitments is ensuring that others keep their agreementswith you. Managers often avoid delegating because they feel that they can do the work betteror faster themselves. This might be true, but it means that the manager is not creating conditions for others to be successful. Moreover, if the job being delegated is repetitive, the benefits
gained over time by not doing it oneself should outweigh the up-front work involved incoaching someone else to do it.
The following guidelines can help you make others’ word good:
1.	Remember that getting others’ support requires clear and regular two-way
communication – both at the outset and over the course of the commitment.
2.	Ensure that your own requests are SMART ones.
3. Give people the opportunity to question or modify the request.
4.	Take time to monitor progress, provide support when asked, and encouragelearning from failures as well as successes along the way.
Meetings also consume an enormous amount of time. As organizations become flatter andmore networked, many meetings across units seem to be required in addition to the more
traditional internal ones. Between endless meetings and emails, many are concerned that they
have precious little time for productive work.
There is so much flux
Improving the productivity of meetings, including evaluating theneed
to have them at all, is an important part of time management.10 At
in organizations that in
the same time we think the proliferation of meetings in today’s organisome cases meetingszations requires a second and more comprehensive response as well.
There is so much flux in organizations that in some cases meetings have
have become a substibecome a substitute for organizational structure and organizationaltute for organizational
norms. An organization-wide task force can be charged with assessing
the way the organization uses meetings overall, gauging their effectivestructure and organiness, training line and network leaders to better use this essential
zational norms.
resource, and simultaneously determining what meetings can be eliminatedentirely or replaced with alternative forms of communication. One partial solution, used bysome companies to reduce meeting gridlock in today’s networked structures, is to segment
types of meetings and schedule all meetings of a similar type on the same days or weeks.
Finally, as we look at how relationships affect people’s ability to manage time, we want tocall attention to that most essential relationship – the one we each have with ourself. Our
experience of vitality is our key “time management” resource. When we feel awake and alive
we can meet our work with strength and energy. When we are dragging ourselves around,
our best hope is to get through the day. One colleague says, “When I am well rested and ingood shape, I can do in four hours what otherwise takes me eight.”
It is easy to neglect self-care in the name of productivity, but working harder and longer is
not more productive beyond a certain point.11 Taking care of ourselves is essential for sustaining joy and commitment to work. Claiming the value of self-care challenges our mental
models. For example, one leader who participates in the daytime yoga class offered at his

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bank tells his colleague, “I’m off to increase my productivity.” Other companies force theiremployees to take vacation by limiting email access during certain periods of the year.
Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, who have worked extensively with both senior managers
and professional athletes, conclude that energy not time is an individual’s most precious
resource.12 They recommend
ways to mobilize energy in fourareas – spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical – whichcorrespond to the four leadership domains described here.
Developing periods of selfrenewal during the day, likefive-minute stretch breaks, canextend and increase energy. For
many, the most importantsource of renewal is their family.
Unfortunately, the demands ofwork often show up at home,where people feel more comfortable expressing the negative
energy that builds up during theday. Approaching family andfriendship as an afterthought oreven a dumping ground threatens the very support that many
people need to maintain sustainable productivity at work.13
Refreshing ourselves at alllevels is key to sustaining interest in work and life. Self-care breaks throughout the day, week,
and year are essential to making the most of the time we have.

Organizing for Action
Taking action inevitably leads to natural disorder: papers and books are placed on surfaces,
e-folders and files are opened, notes are written down, etc. The critical point in keeping trackof information and “stuff” is what we do after we create the disorder. Do we put things away
in places where we can easily retrieve them, or do we allow the temporary chaos to expand
indefinitely? Do we clean up our creative messes or create toxic ones? Honestly answering
these questions can be especially difficult for leaders who see the big picture and don’t want
be bothered with details.
It can be helpful to remember that effective leadership involves implementation as well as
ideas, and that implementation is in the details. People can accomplish great things without
taking care of some of the basics, but there may come a time when addressing fundamentalorganizing skills is necessary.
Organizing for action means creating useful, workable systems and habits for accessing
information quickly, tracking commitments, and managing email effectively. The objective ofa good filing system is retrieval, not storage. After you set up meaningful categories andreflections.solonline.org

Feature n Paul, Stroh 11

locate items where you can quickly find them again, it is important to develop a practice ofsorting through files regularly. Though this can seem like a waste of time, looking for lost
items wastes more. According to one study of offices, 15% of papers are irretrievably lost
regularly, and each lost paper costs the business an average of $120.14
The initial backlog is daunting. Beginning to sort through piles of accumulated paper cancreate anxiety because they are often the build-up of unmade decisions, projects to let go of,or confusion about tasks. The piles are there because we don’t want to deal with them.
Remember your purpose and vision for managing time. Enlist the support of an executive
assistant or professional organizing coach. Repeated short efforts (e.g. 10-30 minutes perday), can eliminate unwieldy piles. Building in the habit of regular filing – once per day, weekor month – prevents the piles from coming back.
A second organizing challenge is tracking the commitments you make to others and others
make to you. Leaders establish commitments in many places throughout the day. We recommend putting them in writing immediately and then, at least once a day, compiling them in
one location. However the list is developed, it is important to select a manageable number of
items for each day before the rush descends – ideally the night before or before opening one’s
email in the morning. Finally, we recommend that leaders conduct a weekly review to update
their commitments and ensure that others are keeping their commitments to them.
Email has become the boon and bane of many people’s organizational lives. It is a timesaving device, which, along with cell phones and Blackberries, has ironically left us with lessdiscretionary time than ever before. One recent client labeled it “a faceless way of delegating
thoughtlessly.” We have found that some people can make best use of email when they follow
certain guidelines such as those in Figure 4. Leaders also have a responsibility to help theirteams and organizations create effective email protocols.

Changing Behavior
Time management practices are habits of thought and action, and thus require time and effort
to change. The challenge is to alter some very personal ways of being in the world. Whilepersonal change is by definition individual, we suggest that the following seven steps mayhelp the process.15

Know Your Purpose for Change
Establishing a powerful purpose for change is key to sustaining energy and motivation forengaging new practices. Ask, “What are the costs of continuing this way, and what are thebenefits of changing?” The costs of mismanaging time can be very high: sustaining damage
to one’s work reputation, losing health and well being, and destabilizing love relationships.
It’s hard to face these costs; yet one’s pain can lead to commitment to a more sustainable wayof living. Identifying the benefits of change can also be motivating: a more stable family life,
better health, a sense of well being, and greater work success might be among them.

Create Your Vision
Visioning helps people establish a new direction that lifts them out of today’s problems. It is
often used to describe a long-term, big-picture aspiration. Athletes use visioning to picture
their desired high performance in a particular event. Visioning is a useful tool for re-crafting
actual days and weeks. Without a picture of a desired daily life, it is easy to get lost in daily

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Managing E-mail1. Focus on your strategic priorities for the day before answering e-mail2. Limit items during the day to check e-mail3. Immediately discard all impersonal irrelevant messages
4. Briefly answer messages that require an immediate response
5. Use subject line protocols to speed up communication
6. Put all information-related e-mails into folders that you have created for that purpose
7. Keep only alive messages in your inbox
8. Allocate time daily or weekly to deal with complex responses
9. Empty your inbox every week
10. Ask people to remove you from their distribution lists that are no longer appropriate
11. Do not write a message when you are upset nor use e-mail for sensitive communications

pressures. Some good questions for visioning are: “How would I like my days to be? How
can I imagine feeling on top of my work and energized? What details of the workday would
I like to handle differently?”

Take Stock of Current Reality
Many people puzzle over how hard it is to get their time under control. They try to manage
their time well, but outside pressures always seem to overwhelm them. Often this dilemmaarises because they have never accurately assessed the sources of their time problems. Theysay, “It’s my boss. It’s the culture here. It’s all those meetings. It’s my Blackberry.” Since theseanswers seem true, they don’t feel the need to inquire more deeply.
Taking stock of current reality involves recognizing the cultural, organizational,
and personal pressures that influence your workload; accurately describing your current
work day; and identifying underlying beliefs and assumptions that determine how you spend
your time. It requires taking personal responsibility for the way things are – recognizing both
one’s conscious choices and unconscious reactions to external pressures.
People often avoid exploring their time management challenges because they feel they
don’t have time to look at how they behave. Surprisingly, though, self-observation doesn’ttake extra time. It takes a willingness to activate an inner witnessing part of the self. When
you lift the veil of labels, judgments and illusions, connecting with reality in an accepting way
can be remarkably satisfying. For many people, it is powerful to start simply observing andgetting to know oneself without empowering the haranguing inner voices, without defendingor shaming oneself.
Taking stock at an organizational level involves developing a systems diagnosis of the root
causes underlying the organization’s problems with time. For example, Figure 2 illuminatedthe reasons why the clinical informatics group felt so stressed and under-resourced. It helped
them have honest conversations about their responsibility for creating the dynamics theyexperienced and to consider alternative responses to company-wide pressures.

Get Support
Support helps us make the often deep changes associated with reallocating our time. It candecrease the sense of isolation – the feeling of being the only one struggling with these issues.

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It can provide accountability or encouragement when
the going gets rough. One
powerful form of support is
1. Know Yourappreciative confrontation:
Purpose for
Change“You are very creative, visionary and wonderful to work
2. Create
7. Gowith in many ways, but I
Your Vision
Deeperdon’t trust that you willmeet our deadlines. It is important that we work together differently.”
Talking about disorgani3. Takezation or poor time man6. Take
Stock ofEffective
agement habits is intensely
Current
ActionRealitypersonal. Thus, getting support should be done withcare. Support for change
helps counter the type of
encouragement that rein5. Identify
Strategies
4. Choose
forces our current behavior.
for Time
SupportManagement“You’re not leaving early
are you? We have so muchto get done.” Or, “I can’t
believe you got that doneahead of schedule. Are you sure you covered everything?” Or, “You were working until ten
last night. I wish everyone had your dedication.”

Figure 3. Changing Behavior

Identify Strategies for Time Management
We have covered many strategies for time management. But, of course, there are many more.
Time management strategies range from clarifying mission, vision and goals to managing
to-do lists, phone calls, and software such as Microsoft Outlook with skill. The key is toimplement a few strategies that yield high leverage for change.

Take Effective Action
In Man’s Search for Meaning Vicktor Frankl noted, “It is not enough that we observe ourselves; we truly learn about ourselves as we take action towards a meaningful goal.”
Taking action in this framework involves testing and experimenting. There is no ‘one size
fits all’ time management strategy. The key question is, “What works for you? How will you
try on a strategy and customize it for yourself?” The main thing is to look for leverage andthe most impactful change. For example, one of our clients determined that getting more
sleep would dramatically help his performance at work. He had been trying to save time bysleeping less, but that was backfiring because his afternoons were so unproductive. Anotherclient decided to stop working at home after dinner. The work she did late at night was uniformly poor quality and always had to be redone. A third client decided to try out the Friday
afternoon weekly review.

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As we take action to change ourselves, we must remember that change can be slow. It often
takes repetition and recommitment, like learning any new behavior. Here it is important to
not give up on change, but to try again – and again if necessary. The stakes
Resolutions to
are too high to give up.

Go Deeperchange are inherently suspect. We
move forward only
to encounter all thereasons we were
better off in thefirst place.

Resolutions to change are inherently suspect. We move forward only to
encounter all the reasons we were better off in the first place. The Biblicalstory of the Hebrews’ exodus from Egypt dramatically points out how
people conditioned to servitude would rather remain enslaved than risk
becoming free. In their book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way
We Work, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey coin the term “competing commitments” to capture the payoffs we experience in the way things are and thecosts we might have to incur to achieve the results we want.
Making new behavior stick requires clarifying the benefits of not changing and the costsof change – and then testing to see if those factors are indeed as powerful as the benefits ofchange and the costs of not changing. For example, Beth, a member of the clinical informatics group, agreed with her supervisor about the risks of saying “No” to clients’ requests.
However, she decided to test her assumptions by asking clients for a specific amount of timeto get back to them with a carefully thought-out answer about what she could – and could
not – deliver. She discovered that, while some clients viewed her as uncooperative, others
respected her professionalism. She decided to continue her new behavior having determinedthat the costs were well worth the rewards.

Summary
In today’s 24/7 world, leaders need to focus on ensuring the sustainable productivity of themselves and the people in their organizations. They need to think of time management as adiscipline of making wise and sometimes difficult choices – not an exercise in doing morewith less. They can do this by identifying and reducing phantom workload, drawing on
numerous strategies to manage time more effectively, tapping resources other than time toincrease productivity and effectiveness, and engaging themselves and others in a process ofchanging behavior. Their lives and the lives of others depend on their ability to manage this
precious resource.

Endnotes
1 “Overloaded Circuits: Why Smart People Underperform,” Edward Hallowell, Harvard Business
Review, January 2005
2 Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, Richard
Boyatzis, Annie McKee, Harvard Business School Press, 2004
3 See, for example, The Time Trap: The Classic Book on Time Management, 3rd edition, R. Alec
Mackenzie, AMACOM, 1997
4 See, for example, “Conquering a Culture of Indecision,” Ram Charan, Harvard Business Review,
January 2006

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5 “Beware the Busy Manager,” Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review,
February 2002
6	 See, for example, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge et al, and Built to Last by James
Collins and Jerry Porras
7 See reference #5 above and “The Five Messages Leaders Must Manage”, John Hamm, Harvard
Business Review, May 2006
8	 “Karen Stephenson’s Quantum Theory of Trust”, Art Kleiner, Strategy + Business, Issue 29
9	 Based on the work of Fernando Flores
10 See, for example, How to Make Meetings Work, Michael Doyle and David Straus, Jove Books,
1976
11 Take Back Your Time, John deGraff (editor), Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2003
12 The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Free Press, 2003
13 The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Arlie Hochschild,
Henry Holt, 2000
14 “So many reasons to neaten up, but it’s too imposing”, Boston Globe, March 12, 2006
15 It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys, Marilyn Paul, Penguin Compass,
2004
Recommended Reading“Beware the Busy Manager,” Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal, Harvard Business Review, February
2002. This article describes the research that demonstrates the importance of a proactive or
creative orientation to effective time management and high performance.
The Power of Full Engagement, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz, Free Press, 2003. Managing one’s
energy and learning how to renew oneself are essential to sustainable productivity. This bookprovides a comprehensive approach and sound research to support it.
It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys, Marilyn Paul, Penguin Compass, 2004.
This book enables disorganized people to meet the challenge of organizing for action. Numerous
tips are presented within the context of the personal behavior change approach described inthis article.

A bo u t t h e A u t h o r s

Marilyn Paul, Ph.D. and David Peter Stroh are the principals of Bridgeway Partners(www.bridgewaypartners.com). They combine over 40 years experience consulting to business,
public, and social sector organizations around the world.
Marilyn’s special areas of interest are time management, disorganization, and managing workload
systemically. She is the author of the acclaimed book It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t
Find Your Keys (Penguin Compass, 2004).
David was a co-founder of Innovation Associates, the pioneering consulting firm in the area oforganizational learning. His expertise lies in visionary planning, leadership development, systems
thinking, organization design, and change management.
mpaul@bridgewaypartners.com
dstroh@bridgewaypartners.com

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F E AT U R E 7 . 4

Systems Intelligence:

A Key Competence for Organizational Life
Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Esa SaarinenW

Raimo P. Hämäläinen

Esa Saarinen

e all have to act without knowing for certain what our choices will bring. We cannot seize a situation or stop the flow of time in order to analyze the various underlying patterns of the system in which we are embedded. And yet we all wish to act
intelligently – indeed, we must.
By systems intelligence,1 we mean intelligent behavior in the context of complex systems
involving interaction and feedback. A person acting with systems intelligence engages successfully and productively with the holistic feedback mechanisms of her environment. She
experiences herself as part of an interdependent environment, aware of the influence of thewhole upon herself as well as her own influence upon the whole. With this heightened awareness, she is able to act intelligently.
We believe that systems intelligence is a higher-level cognitive capacity, similar to the many
forms of intelligence Howard Gardner identifies in his theory of multiple intelligences,2 andthat it can provide a significant fresh approach for organizational learning practitioners.
The systems intelligence approach acknowledges the systemic nature of the external world,
but its main emphasis is on the concept of a system as part of the human experience andorientation. A “system” is a generative frame within which a subject experiences her life as
taking place. The system moves, pushes, restricts, conditions, encourages, suggests, seduces,and commands: It seems to have a will and voice of its own. There is no way to fully knowwhat it is.
The human race clearly must have had some form of practical intelligence to have survived
as long as it has. That intelligence must have demonstrated itself in action, as humans reacted to, adjusted to, and made use of sometimes rapidly changing circumstances. Insight,
knowledge acquisition, judgment, and analysis must have had prominent roles in the successstory of the human race, of course, but before them came action – action that must have been
intelligent before being acknowledged by a rational subject as intelligent.

From Systems Thinking to Systems Intelligence
When we launched the systems intelligence project, our starting point was Peter Senge’s The
Fifth Discipline.3 But we felt that a link between Senge’s discipline of “personal mastery” andhis discipline of “systems thinking” was missing.
The systems intelligence approach basically takes Senge’s discipline of personal masteryand the systems perspective as fundamental, and considers the discipline of systems thinking
as secondary. We feel there is an objectifying bias in systems thinking, a bias for cognitive
rationality and external viewpoint. Systems thinking highlights a domain of objects it believes is neglected – systems. But systems remain objects nonetheless, entities to be identified

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and reflected from the outside. The systems intelligence approach avoids this externalist trap.
Another aspect of the descriptions of systems thinking we felt uncomfortable with was thenegative impacts that systems are often portrayed as producing. In the beer game describedin The Fifth Discipline, for example, the individual can never fully succeed. He cannot flourish. He can improve his game performance somewhat, but ultimately the system structure
forces him to acknowledge failure.
Similarly, the “system archetypes” of systems thinking focus on
Insight, knowledge
describing how things can go wrong when systems structures are notacquisition, judgment, acknowledged. “Limits to growth,” “shifting the burden,” “eroding
and analysis must have goals,” “tragedy of the commons,” and “fixes that backfire” all highhad prominent roles in light the negative traps people can fall into as a result of not appreciating
the relevant systems structures.
the success story of
The systems intelligence approach, in contrast, focuses on what people
do right and could improve upon in systemic settings. It assumes thatthe human race.
people possess a kind of inherent pre-rational and pre-reflective systems
thinking capability. The key idea is what we call flourishment, a capacity for flourishing, as
opposed to simply avoiding pitfalls. Systems intelligence thus calls for a positive systems
scholarship, and sides with “positive organizational scholarship”4 and “positive psychology”5 movements in its focus on human flourishing, in contrast to human malfunctions.
Systems intelligence also reflects the approach of “action research.”6
Since we proposed the idea of systems intelligence in 2002, it has been applied to avoiding
conflicts in environmental management, merger and acquisition issues, classroom pedagogy, themes of rewards and compensation, the theory of constraints, Sun Tzu’s writings,
and management and leadership coaching, to name a few applications.7 During the past
few years, the systems intelligence approach has become something of a movement in organizational life in Finland, discussed even on the chief editorial page of our major national
newspaper.8

It Works in Practice, but Does It Work in Theory?
We began with the idea that it is essential to combine several perspectives that have traditionally remained isolated in academics and intellectual life:
1. Philosophy of life as an everyday activity reaching out to people irrespective of theirbackground
2. Systems perspective with its emphasis on the whole and the complexity of the essential
phenomena of human life
3.	Human-centered leadership for change that builds on the hidden dimensions of humansubjectivity, existential situation, and interaction
4.	Appreciation for humanly rich activities such as sports, music, performing arts, andsuccessful conduct of the everyday
We were interested in human activities that worked, even when there was no theory to
explain why they worked, or even a recognized need for a theory.
The starting point was pragmatic and emerged from an engineering mind-set. Raimo
Hämäläinen’s background is in engineering sciences and operations research (often referred
to as the science of making things better9); Esa Saarinen is a philosopher whose interest has

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been in bringing philosophy to everyday
contexts and to organizational life. Like
Hämäläinen in the decades of his tenure at
Helsinki University of Technology, Saarinen
has worked extensively with engineeringorganizations such as Nokia.
Engineering thinking is based on the idea ofchange. Make X work, it says, and improveupon what doesn’t work. One uses rationality and creativity in order to bringworkable solutions to a concrete reality.
One celebrates success even when not understanding exactly why something that works
does work. Thus, for an engineer’s mind-set, asystem that works comes first; understanding andexplaining why it works comes second. In the realm of everyday
life, a kiss or warm laughter, an apology or an uplifting glance might
resolve a tricky situation in a relationship. For the mind-set of a “master of the everyday,”
what works comes first; understanding why it works comes second.
Such was our starting point. We were saying: Let’s allow the system’s working to guide us;
let’s focus primarily on the actual emergence of a human system instead of focusing on our
cognitive maps of that emergence. And we assumed that human beings do just that, as partof their inherent orientation toward living intelligently.

Pitfalls of Systems Intelligence
The systems intelligence perspective is radical because:• It wishes to account for an individual’s fundamental ability (intelligence) in a way that
does not conceptually presuppose the subject–object distinction, but seeks to connect
her with a situation, a context, and other people’s realities – a system – considered as
primary as the subject herself• It wishes to account for an individual’s nonrational, nonpropositional and noncognitive
capabilities, such as instinctual awareness, touch, “feel,” and sensibilities at large, ascapabilities that relate the subject intelligently to a system (the situation, context, otherpeople)• It explicitly seeks out the positive dimension of life, assuming humans will flourish;assuming magnificent success, uplift, and growth to be fundamental human realities
rather than mere positive exceptions
A key contrast between systems thinking and systems intelligence lies in our refusal to takethe outsider’s view of the systems being addressed. Causal loop diagrams, for instance, are
not as useful in systems intelligence as they are in systems thinking. The systems intelligenceapproach says the primary situation is one in which the individual already identifies himself
as being in the loop and does not step outside the loop to reflect on it in isolation. He does
not necessarily know and perhaps will never know exactly what the loop is, and yet that isthe context of his actions and of potential flourishment. How can he behave intelligently?

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How can a human act intelligently (indeed, act magnificently) in contexts, in environments,
and among other people – in systems – when a veil of uncertainty is always present? Whatcan intelligent choice mean when one cannot step aside and sort out the options and theirsystemic impact? These are the key questions of the systems intelligence approach.
Our conviction is that human beings do possess such systemic intelligence. We believe
people do own an almost miraculous means of access to the realm of flourishment. People
are intelligent creatures, more so than is sometimes appreciated. Positive reciprocity works:
It can bring about wonders, and its dynamics are intuitively appreciated by all of us. Let’s
focus on that! The point is not so much to teach people something new but to awaken acompetence they already have. The systems intelligence movement helps people excel insomething they have exercised already, often with considerable success.

Optimism for Change
Change starts somewhere. It might emerge from something trivial. And yet it might amountto a huge restructuring of the fundamental aspects of the entire system – because of the leverage created by:•	Change in the way people experience other agents of the system as a result of a small
but significant change in others’ behavior•	Change in the way people experience their own possibilities of acting within the system
as a result of a small but significant change somewhere in the system•	Change in the way people experience the likely structure of the system in the long run
When Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man in a Montgomery city bus in 1955,
most people had not heard of Rosa Parks, considered the bus system a technical matter, did
not perceive the city of Montgomery as being particularly significant, and would have considered irrelevant the question of a particular bus seat on a particular bus leg. But as Rosa
Parks was arrested, the marginal incident snowballed, creating an avalanche that eventuallyreached epic proportions. Change was going to reshape the entire system of race distinctionin the most powerful country in the world.
Our philosophy of change is optimistic because of our view of people’s beliefs and thefunctioning of their internal system. Our conviction is that many of the core beliefs of the

A Systems-Intelligent Organization• Empowers people to share their mental models of the organization and to consider the effectsof their own actions on the whole• Fosters and sustains inquiry mode and reduces advocacy• Keeps down fear factors• Helps people be responsive to flourishing initiatives• Builds trust in the goodwill of others• Sees that its production capacity is not restricted to the measurable variables but is extended
to the world of emotions and well-being• Elevates innovation within an environment where emotional variables do not limit performance

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people around us do not show
up in their actions. The actions
reflect the assumed nature of
the current system. People haveadjusted to what they believe isthe system – e.g., to the way
whites regard blacks. But when
the system is shaken, the latentbeliefs might trigger a revolution. Given a small but criticalchange in the system, deeply
held aspirations might suddenly
surface, adding exponentiallyto the momentum.
Beliefs are distinctive in having a fundamentally ephemeralessence: They can be changed
dramatically, massively, andinstantaneously. People might
get excited, might start believing in the future, might start totrust and respect one anotheras a result of something relatively small and mundane. For
systems intelligence, this is the
key: small changes that transform something major; a kindof “butterfly effect” in the context of our life systems.
Systems intelligence focuses on changes as leveraged by the dual force fields of the systemic and movable nature of the human mental world and the systemic nature of the context,
situation, and behaviors around us. It takes the idea of people’s internal and malleable world
utterly seriously. We do not fear the subjective or the emotional, the experiential or the phenomenological – indeed, we embrace those things. Therein lies the source of emergence.
One might be terribly misguided regarding what others truly believe and what might movethem toward flourishment. Our patterns of interaction, our tactics, might be utterly misplaced. There might be a systematic flaw in the way a group experiences the subjective worldsof others. The “reality” we form together might be a castle built on quicksand, destroying
the higher possibilities of life.
Systems intelligence is based on humility and optimism. It acknowledges that one’s perspective of others might be drastically mistaken, particularly regarding what others’ true
aspirations might be. An incremental and seemingly trivial change in my behavior might bea significant change for the better in the eyes of another, might intervene with her beliefs
regarding me, might lead her to appreciate suddenly what life is all about, and might thus
trigger a chain of changes in the actual behaviors of each of us and in the system we form
together.

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To the extent that we are ignorant regarding the aspirations of others in the system, there
is also a hidden possibility of cumulative enrichment and improvement through reciprocity.
Fresh possibilities of flourishment are always there, simply because most forms of interaction
have not been tried. Our patterns of interaction are highly standardized, are often low inemotional energy,10 and typically hide the positive options. Systems
People thrive on meanintelligence is an approach of realistic hands-on optimism, based oning. As a result, the most acknowledging the possibility of upward-spiraling change throughhuman reciprocity.
forceful forms of systems
This sort of thinking is often dismissed as wishful idealism. Yet it
intelligence intervention amounts to an appreciation of some of the most powerful moments ofmost people’s lives – those moments when their actions flow with theare likely to be thosesituation, when people are in synch, when positivity rules, when thethat touch basic human system flies and we fly with the system.
Adapting terminology from “systems archetypes,” one could
aspirations.
reconstruct many of one’s best moments in life – or, for example, thehistory of the civil rights movement in the United States – in terms of systems intelligencearchetypes: “fixes that fire,” “sharing the burden,” and “miracle of the commons.”

Marshall Mannerheim Enters the StageAs Finland was fighting for its (eventually successful) independence against Stalin’s Red Army
during World War II, the Finnish commander-in-chief Marshall Mannerheim sometimes
visited the front. A tall, cultivated man in his 80s in excellent physical shape, Mannerheim
was a towering figure, respected by all Finns.
Mannerheim’s junior adjutant at the time was Colonel Rafael Bäckman. According to
Bäckman, Mannerheim would sometimes stop while walking in a trench and take out a cigarette. This, Bäckman explained, offered a possibility for a soldier standing nearby to approachand offer a light for the commander-in-chief. After the cigarette was lit, Mannerheim would
talk informally with the soldier, typically about his home and loved ones.
Consider this an example of systems intelligence. Suppose you are a soldier out there in a
trench and observe your charismatic commander-in-chief approaching with his entourage.
How are you to strike a sufficiently impressive pose? You are trapped in a system that hardly
allows you to breathe. And yet a small intervention – a cigarette lighting – can change it all.
Being attuned to opportunities to make similar interventions is key to systems intelligence.

Systemic Leverage
Our assumption is that people experience and interpret situations from a systemic point ofview. Then they adapt to the system and operate within the system. But as we have said, thesystem could be different from what people believe it to be. There is tremendous leveragebuilt into any human context, if only people would interpret the system as having changed.
Even if it hasn’t yet changed, it will change, when enough people believe it has changed. Herelies the opportunity of systemic intervention. In human contexts, almost anything has thepotential to signal a change for hope. A clean subway car, completely free of graffiti, canbecome a powerful symbol of an entirely new era.
The interpretation of a given incident as a symbol of change in the human context is

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highly variable. Interpretation is everything; it defines the realm of possibility. And sometimes
people grasp that possibility, personally and powerfully. The catch for a rationalist lies in thelack of clear-cut predictability. In the context of human change, the logic typically is not “ifx, then y.” Instead, one needs to be sensitive, situation-conscious, emotionally alert, sufficiently distanced, and sufficiently connected; one needs to be fine-tuned to the nonrational
undercurrents in the context in order to make things work and in order to flourish. It is suchsensitivity that systems intelligence wants to elicit.
People thrive on meaning. As a result, the most forceful forms of systems intelligence intervention are likely to be those that touch basic human aspirations, especially:
1.	A person’s sense of worth and desire to be respected
2.	A person’s desire to feel connected in the company of others
3.	A person’s desire to feel connected with something meaningful
An intervention that touches upon aperson’s basic needs is likely to inspirechange through the internal system of that
person.

Rose-Buying Finns
Most Finnish husbands do not buy roses
for their wives spontaneously on normal
weekdays. A non-rose-buying system is inplace, creating behaviors that generate thelack of rose buying. The system is invisible, as part of the accepted reality. A man
who buys a rose is experienced as having
made a choice, but a man who doesn’t isnot experienced as having chosen not tobuy a rose. It is almost as if some higher
authority governs the rose-buying behaviors of all these non-rose-buying men.
The system, no doubt, is in place partly
because of the experiences each particular
man in his seasoned marriage has undergone over the course of years. His wife haschanged, he feels, and is becoming increasingly negative. She is unenthusiastic about
life. She never puts on lipstick at home justfor him. His wife seems overly pragmatic.
Not much of a spark left. He reacts to this,suppressing his more romantic ideas andgestures, a dimension in which he was never strong to begin with. But the same is true of thewife: The two are caught in a system of mutually holding back. The two have created a system, and now the system rules.
Consider the rose buying as a metaphor for small behavioral actions that could touch thereflections.solonline.org

Feature n Hämäläinen, Saarinen 23

other positively. A husband who buys his wife roses will strengthen her faith in life, optimism,
hope, and sense of worth.
Now consider the workplace. One would expect the workplace to be unconditionally alert
to such systems of “rose buying,” i.e., to systems of generating faith, optimism, and strengthin people, particularly as that will result in greater productivity for the business and becausesuch systems can be created free of cost.
This turns out not to be the case. Instead, systems of holding back, in return and inadvance, rule everywhere:• Most managers want to support their team members more than they currently do. Most
team members would like to get more support from their managers. Yet more support
does not result. There seems to be a lack-of-support system in place.
• Most speakers would like to give their best in a presentation. People attending the presentation would
The sensitive, the instinctual,
benefit most if the speaker were at her best. But thethe contextual, the situational,
speaker does not give her best, and the audience does
not receive the best. There seems to be a poor-presenthe emotional, and the subjective
tation-generating system in place.
elements and capabilities reside• Most people would benefit from coworkers’ generosright there at the center of
ity in everyday situations (showing interest, being
polite or considerate, expressing appreciation, giving
human individual and collective
credit to others, etc.) Most people would themselves
action, organizational behavior,
like to provide such gestures more than they do. But
generosity is scarce. There seems to be a non-generosityand systemic change.
generating system in place.
Holding back is a key form of human interaction. Systems of holding back trap us fromeverywhere – from within and from without. Such systems trivialize reciprocity, decrease
vitality, and depress human life. It requires intelligence just to adjust to them. Higher intelligence is needed if you want to overcome the system – a possibility that the systems intelligence approach offers.

Five Levels of Systems Intelligence
1. Seeing oneself in the system: Ability to see oneself and one’s roles and behavior in the system,
and also through the eyes of other people and with different framings of the system. Systems
thinking awareness.
2. Thinking about systems intelligence: Ability to envision and identify productive ways of behavior
for oneself in the system and cognitively understanding systemic possibilities emerging from one’s
choices.
3. Managing systems intelligence: Ability to personally exercise productive ways of behaving within
the system.
4. Sustaining systems intelligence: Ability to continue and foster systems-intelligent behavior in thelong run.
5. Leadership with systems intelligence: Ability to initiate and create systems-intelligent organizations.

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Window of Opportunity
Systems intelligence is based on the insightthat systems of holding back prevail everywhere, and yet do not tell the whole story.
Fear rules over courageousness, ingratitude
over gratitude, taking over giving. And yet
there is more to humans than meets the eye –more that is good.
An entirely different story is hiding beneaththe surface, and it could be triggered to emerge
by a marginal change. This is because people
are not likely to reveal their discontent withwhat they believe is unchangeable. But suppose hope returns, excitement comes back,and someone realizes that a seemingly
unchangeable system actually is a construction, an artifact from top to bottom, based
entirely on human choice.
Saarinen’s initial interest in systems of holding back grew out of his desire to find examples of choice that people could not deny. He
was led to studying small behaviors thatwould benefit others, would not require any
material resources, and yet failed to materialize. These included the failure of a longtime
couple to hold hands in a shopping mall, or
the failure of a professional to lean forward
and pay attention to a colleague giving a presentation, or the failure of a manager to starta meeting with a few informal, credit-giving words.
Why is there a universally accepted people’s movement to, say, not give credit? Why apeople’s movement to not pay attention at meetings? The lack of positive small behaviors
reveals a complement: the domain of small actions that could have been.
That domain is huge – and it is a source of tremendous leverage if perceived in systemic terms.
When people are shown examples drawn from marriage, it is remarkably easy regardlessof their socioeconomic levels, age or education backgrounds, to gain insight into their own
holding-back behaviors and to the unintended consequences created thereby. Systems of holding back are at the core of our everyday living, and of all organized life, in a way that is easy
for people to comprehend intuitively and personally.
Systems of holding back are a route to appreciating the constructed nature of our everyday
modes of being. As soon as that element is appreciated, the fundamental possibility of humanchoice enters the picture – choice conceived of as a personal possibility on the level of small
everyday behaviors.
Personally perceived choice resulting in taking an action is a key idea in systems intelligence. The point is to highlight choice in order to pave the way to an empowered practice ofchange. It is essential to discuss behaviors in which the agent indisputably does have a choice,even when judged by his own perhaps distorted and biased internal belief system.

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Feature n Hämäläinen, Saarinen 25

A Systems-Intelligent Leader
Strives to learn and reach Level 5 (See “Five Levels of Systems Intelligence,” page 24).
• Sees herself in the system with a mission to develop a systems-intelligent organization• Is aware of the human perspective and of the possibilities of human reciprocity• Operates within the visible system and manages the emotional system simultaneously• Is not held captive by a mechanistic perspective• Identifies and eliminates structural systems dictatorships that alienate people from their own choices• Recognizes systems intelligence as a personal growth challenge and an asset to success

The intellectual complexity of the choice is rarely the issue. As a result, causal loop diagrams are not likely to be of much use. What is the bottleneck if not lack of knowledge?
Our answer is: human self-centeredness, lack of sensitivity, and lack of belief in the humanpotential in us and around us.
An egoistical, cynical person views a system coldly from the outside, intending to find an
objective reality. He might be effective in the short run in his efforts to manipulate the systemfrom outside. But the alternative is to step inside, open up the system, and open up himself;
working openly, sensitively, attentively, with systems intelligence. In short, the alternative is
to make the system flourish. The sensitive, the instinctual, the contextual, the situational, theemotional, and the subjective elements and capabilities reside right there at the center ofhuman individual and collective action, organizational behavior, and systemic change.

Why Systems Intelligence Projects Fail
Senge, in the revised edition of The Fifth Discipline (2006), openly acknowledges that building learning organizations has turned out to be significantly more difficult than what heenvisioned in 1990. Likewise Jeremy Seligman,11 describing his experiences building a systems thinking (ST) culture at Ford, writes bluntly, “sometimes it seems doubtful that ST will
ever gain the critical mass required to make it an integral part of how major corporations
practice strategic thinking.” This is where we believe the systems intelligence approach points
the way forward.
First, observe why systems intelligence projects can easily fail. ST projects aim to increase
people’s knowledge of an organization’s systemic structures by teaching people the use of
systemic tools such as loop diagrams and stock-and-flow computer models. But none of thatknowledge necessarily touches their everyday holding-back behaviors, or the holding-backsystems generated by such behaviors.
It is clear that a learning organization can never flourish if it remains a system of holding
back. But systems of holding back lurk at the human level, in the dimension of the mundane;
they are in many cases intellectually trivial, often seemingly invisible, hiding as they do behindthe curtain of custom and conformity, and generally not approachable from the outside.
ST projects fail because people need not change their small, behaviorally relevant modesof thinking, mental models, and dialogical patterns as a result of increased knowledge ofvarious aspects of systems intelligence or of the systems structures involved. But small behav-

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iors generate systems of holding back, creating a hidden, crushingly powerful counterforce tothe systems thinker’s well-intended and rationally sound effort to launch ST initiatives inorder for the organization to “grasp the big picture” and to “understand the long-term
effects.”

Becoming More Systems Intelligent
The learning organization movement has struggled with the fact that as systems thinking
programs are driven into organizations, surprisingly little changes. “Problems may get solved,
but the organization will be no smarter,” as Peter Senge puts it in the revised Fifth
Discipline.12
We believe what is called for is a movement toward the
We believe what is called
individual, the subjective, and the emotional. This is what thefor is a movement toward thesystems intelligence perspective attempts to accomplish. We
believe the systems intelligence approach offers a way for- individual, the subjectivity andward from some of the traps the learning organization movethe ecmotional. This is what
ment seems to have fallen into. At the same time, the systems
the systems intelligence
intelligence approach builds upon Senge’s original insight
regarding the significance of the systems perspective.
perspective attempts to
The systems intelligence perspective has already proven its
accomplish.
ability to stimulate learning. In the context of lectures andseminars, we have observed that people feel strongly encouraged to further develop a capability they already possess, more so than they might embracecognitive learning of material they might feel is too abstract.
The concept itself points the way. It is heuristically energetic. In most cases only a few
sentences of explanation are needed in order for people to feel ready to move ahead with theconcept and apply it to their own situations. The word system encourages a hands-on attitude: It suggests something that is constructed, something that is working – and thus something that could work better. Learning together is important, but acting together for
flourishment is even more so. That is the possibility the systems intelligence approach wishes
to highlight.
Endnotes
1

The introduction of the systems intelligence concept and the seminal essays on it were first presented in Finnish in 2002, and they appeared in the report series of the Systems Analysis
Laboratory. In 2004, the first essays in English were published in Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Esa
Saarinen, editors, Systems Intelligence: Discovering a Hidden Competence in Human Action andOrganisational Life (Helsinki University of Technology: Systems Analysis Laboratory Research
Reports A 88, 2004). The key texts therein are the introduction and chapter 1: “Systems
Intelligence: Connecting Engineering Thinking with Human Sensitivity,” by Esa Saarinen and Raimo
P. Hämäläinen.

2

For the MI theory, see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (NewYork: Basic Books, 1983; 1993), and Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21stCentury (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

3

Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990; 2006).

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Feature n Hämäläinen, Saarinen 27

4See, e.g., Kim S. Cameron, Jane E. Dutton, and Robert E. Quinn, editors, Positive Organizational

5See, e.g., C.R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez, editors, Handbook of Positive Psychology (New York:

Scholarship (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003).
Oxford University Press, 2001).
6

See P. Reason and H. Bradbury, editors, Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry &7

The related essays are in the publication in note 1. The home pages of our research group provide

Practice (London: Sage Publications, 2001).
free access to all the materials, essays, and slides. www.systemsintelligence.hut.fi
8

The article by the editor-in-chief, Reetta Meriläinen, titled “There would be a standing order forsystems intelligence” (“Systemiälylle olisi kestotilaus”), was published in the daily newspaper
Helsingin Sanomat on July 16, 2006.)

9

See “Operations Research: The Science of Better” Web site, www.scienceofbetter.org

10 On emotional energy, see Randall Collins’s important Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2004).
11 Jeremy Seligman, “Building a Systems Intelligence Culture at Ford Motor Company,” Reflections,Vol. 6, No. 4/5.
12 Peter M. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 2006). Page 332.

A B O U T T H E A U T H O Rs

Raimo P. Hämäläinen is a professor of operations research and director at the Systems Analysis
Laboratory, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. His research interests range from systems
intelligence to multi-criteria decision-making, negotiations and game theory. He also has extensive
experience in the decision support and facilitation of environmental and energy policy studies.
raimo@cc.hut.fi
Esa Saarinen is a philosopher and professor of systems sciences at Helsinki University ofTechnology. A highly acclaimed lecturer who has brought philosophy to an interface with everyday life, Saarinen has worked extensively with Nokia and other Finnish businesses. He has
authored Imagologies: Media Philosophy (with Mark. C. Taylor) and numerous books in Finnish.
esa@hut.fi

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emerging knowledge forum

Teaching Organizational Learning:
Permission to Exhale
Phil Ramsey
When I first encounteredorganizational learning as adiscipline I felt a deep senseof relief that, at last, I wasable to teach issues that I
knew were missing from
“Management” curriculum,
but which I had been unable
to name or to justify fromPhil Ramsey
an academic perspective. I
felt that the world – including the world of business– was complex, and I had not been doing justice tothat complexity. We were simplifying management
by dropping some issues, and the issues we were dropping were the ones that appealed to me the most.
These were the issues that organizational learning
addressed.
As I learned about organizational learning it
became apparent why this work addresses what I felt
was missing. Organizational learning is the study ofthe gap between how we think our organizations
work and how they actually do work.1 In other words,
whatever is missing from our understanding of organizational life and functioning can be legitimately
investigated by those interested in organizational
learning.
Organizational learning also seemed to me to beclosely connected with another of my interests, thestudy of organizational culture. The connection I saw
was that communities – including organizational
communities – form cultures as they establish somevalues as legitimate while repressing other values.
Organizational learning, therefore, deals with a cultural challenge: how to address a full range of humanvalues, including those that are currently being repressed within organizations.2 When people arereflections.solonline.org

allowed to express previously repressed values, theeffect is similar to being allowed to exhale after you
have been holding your breath for a length of time.
It feels fantastic, invigorating.
The challenge I felt as a teacher, was how to help
students understand this invigorating aspect of organizational learning. I wanted to do more than teachstudents about organizational learning. I wanted themto experience what it is to be involved in organizational learning as a participant. In essence, I wanted
to turn my classroom into a learning organization.
This is what I have been experimenting with overthe last ten years. My primary opportunity for experimentation takes place during a week-long course
on organizational learning, held midyear. The weeklong course is one component of a year-long course:
students work collaboratively during the week, andindividually throughout the rest of the year. This
article is the product of my reflections on some of thelessons learned from my experiences attempting tocreate a learning organization in the classroom.
Oddly, while it might appear at first glance thatlearning in a university would restrict one’s ability tocreate a “learning organization” environment, the prevailing university culture of “inhaling only” sets students up to experience the invigoration of exhalation.

University Culture
What do universities generally have in common thatmakes them different from other organizations? A
defining feature of their business is that high value isplaced on people acting as experts.
Those who have established their expertise are ina position to teach others. Teaching generally involves
what we might call “cognitive transfer” of knowledge:

EKF ■ Ramsey 29

the expert teacher finds some way to express what
they know so that the knowledge is transferred tothe mind of the learner. Learners undergo processesof assessment in order to establish the extent towhich the transfer has been successful. The assessment determines where learners sit in the journey
toward becoming experts themselves.
This process is well established in universities, somuch so that little thought is given to the assumptions and values upon which it operates. A central
assumption is that learning is a cognitive process: it
is about concepts and facts, and not about relationships and emotions. A student needs only to know
the answers in the examination: there is no extra
benefit in caring about the subject or wanting to bepart of a community that uses the knowledge. Youmight observe that students tend to get similar
grades across subjects: one might be an “A” student
and one a “C” student irrespective of whether theycare about the subject or whether they want to use
the knowledge they have gained. Such issues are
peripheral and treated by many as a distraction fromthe real business of assessing cognitive transfer.
Acting in this way encourages one set of values
while repressing others. People are encouraged to act
as individuals, taking care of what they personallyneed to do to qualify. Collaboration is not valued:
students often feel deeply uncomfortable, even

30 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

aggrieved, when they are assessed on work they havedone as part of a group. “Good” students feel
obliged to carry the group on their individual shoulders, rather than learn skills of collaboration.
Teachers are encouraged to act in a disconnected,
emotionally-neutral way when it comes to assessment. They make a clear distinction between themselves and the student body so that they do not givean unfair advantage to any student. While the power
difference between the qualified, expert teacher andthe not-yet qualified students may be somewhat hidden at other times, it becomes magnified duringassessment. A teacher’s emotional engagement withstudents as part of a closely connected learning community is not valued. Rather, it is treated withsuspicion because it is likely to affect what is more
highly valued: objectivity in assessment.
How does this culture provide a context for experiencing organizational learning as an invigoratingprocess? The assumptions and values discussed here– teaching as cognitive transfer, expertise, individualism, and objectivity – are taken for granted by most
within the culture. They repress values associatedwith collaboration, community, and emotional
engagement without intending to do so. Teachers ofsome courses in universities will teach people about
the need for the repressed values in learning, and still
revert to methods of assessment prescribed by thereflections.solonline.org

culture.3 The university culture has set students up toexperience a sense of relief if they should everencounter learning that allows them to experience
the repressed values in action: they are, in fact, waiting to exhale.
Teaching organizational learning is an ideal
opportunity to enable students to experience thisexhilaration. The subject matter of organizational
learning is directly aligned with the values that are
traditionally repressed in universities. As an organizational learning teacher, I am in an envious position
where, if I practice what I preach, students will experience exhilaration! The challenge has been to findways to do this in a university context.

Lessons Learned
Practicing what I preach has been an on-going journey of discovery. Over the past ten years I haveexperimented with strategies aimed at closing the
gap between my teaching practice and organizational learning concepts. At times the lessons I
learned were the result of thoughtful application ofa technique I had learned. Often lessons were serendipitous, as my students and I stumbled upon waysof handling challenges that presented themselves.
While the latter involved actions that were not theresult of carefully applied concepts, we have beenable to make good use of hindsight, linking actions
to organizational learning concepts after the event.
Following are some of the key lessons I have learned.
Notice that many of them are inter-linked: the classroom needs to be treated as a system.

Learning to collaborate requires
interdependence
People in universities are used to working in loosely
formed groups. Academics often operate in units
where they may interact with one another regularly, but do not actually depend on one another inmeaningful ways. Similarly, students may interact
with one another in classes, but when it really matters– when they are being assessed – they operate independent of one another. In many institutions, rely-reflections.solonline.org

ing on the work of others is considered “cheating.”4
A class on organizational learning needs to contain some aspects of assessment that students complete in teams. These teams can act as a vehicle forteaching a variety of organizational learning concepts while allowing students to experience how theconcepts apply to a situation that is meaningful tothem: the healthy functioning of a team to which
they belong.

Expand the Core Group5
The “core group” in a community consists of those
who really matter. People look to the core group to
determine what is important to the community.
Often structural elements in universities make it
clear that the core group consists solely of the teacher. For instance, the chairs and desks in many classrooms are laid out in rows so that everyone islooking at the “expert” teacher at the front.
Communication happens between individual students and the teacher. The physical layout discourages students from talking to one another: thearrangement encourages students to attend to theteacher, not to one anther.
For several years whenever I ran the course, I
would spend some time rearranging furniture, moving desks out of rows to create enlarged café tables
at which teams of five or six could work. This
arrangement prompted students to interact directlywith one another. Teams formed their own coregroups, with each team acting as a “fractal” of theclass as a whole. The amount of interaction wasradically enhanced. When I interacted with one team– for instance, when giving feedback – members of
the team responded as if it were personal interaction
with them as individuals.
Then one year a variety of events prevented mefrom rearranging the furniture in advance. When I
arrived to teach, students were already seated inrows. It was clear from their faces that they werealready bored: the layout of the room generated the
expectation that they were going to be sitting andlistening for the duration of a five-day course.
I decided to begin with a short discussion about

EKF ■ Ramsey 31

the mental models of whoever chose to set the furniture out in rows: what assumptions could the classsee embedded in the arrangement? Then I asked students how we might arrange the room to represent
more of what they had learned about organizational
learning from their pre-course readings. I shared myexperience of working with teams in small groups.
Then the students moved the furniture to where theywanted it.
The result of having students move the furniture
themselves was remarkable. There was a burst ofenergy as they took control of their own space andbegan interacting with one another with freedom
and vigour. Physically organizing their own space
dramatically altered student’s expectations and wasa powerful example of being allowed, finally, toexhale. Further, students were left with a deep understanding that the room belonged to them and thatthey could alter it in ways that enhanced their interactions and learning.
Having the class shift the furniture also allows me
to establish myself as a host rather than the classexpert. As people organize the furniture and themselves into teams I have them move into the first“café conversation” of the course: discussing how
we will work together if we are to ensure that wecreate a learning organization experience. As theconversation begins in the various groups, I movethrough the classroom placing a vase of flowers oneach team’s table. While only minimally decorative,
students recognise my effort as an indication that weare creating an environment in which conversationand interaction is welcomed.
As the teacher, I recognise that, even though I
have expanded the core group, I am still in the central position in that core. In taking this action I am
helping to ensure that my actions are in line with myespoused theories regarding organizational learning.

community that is meaningful to them. Often theywant to learn things that will enable them to moveto a more central position in a community of which
they are already a member. Alternatively, they may
be motivated to learn so that they can move into a
new community.6
Academic programs traditionally concentrate on
subject matter, with teachers focusing their efforts on
a body of knowledge. Social issues are peripheral. If
people within a class form social bonds that is abonus (or, occasionally, a threat) for the teacher
whose job is to cover a predetermined amount ofmaterial. Our teaching more closely reflects theactual motivation of learners if we make social factors a central concern and make “covering the material” more peripheral.
Ask educators about the most common mistakethey make and you are likely to be told “I tried tocover too much material.” This is symptomatic offocusing attention on subject matter. When I beganteaching the week-long course I made the mistake ofthinking that, to give value to learners, I needed to
introduce them to as many concepts and techniques
as possible. The result was a course that felt fragmented and rushed, and which was exhausting foreveryone.
Now the course is structured around the twopieces of work that people complete in teams. My
role is to ensure that there is an appropriate mix ofthe “familiar” and the “exciting”; that teams engage
in routine work that is punctuated by the injection ofchallenging concepts that illuminate the work they
are doing and the challenges they encounter.
Challenging concepts need to be presented in a waythat takes people out of their routine: either with aninnovative approach to presentation or a guest
speaker with high credibility.

Assessment is a point of leverage
Create a vibrant “Community of Practice”
There is a growing recognition that learning is asocial process and that teachers need to give muchgreater attention to issues of community. People are
motivated to learn out of a desire to move into a

32 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4Students are familiar with situations where they
establish a healthy productive relationship with ateacher, only to have everything change when it
comes time for assessment. At assessment time theteacher ceases to be the person interested in facilitat-reflections.solonline.org

ing your learning and development, and shifts backto a command and control learning style of operating.
Students are reminded of the power held by theteacher. They inhale and hold their collective breath.
Typically, student’s primary concerns are that (1)they pass, and (2) the assessment is equitable. As aconsequence they feel torn by the changes describedabove. They welcome the opportunity to work collaboratively within a learning environment that is
free from the excesses of command and control
learning management. At the same time, they havequalms about what this will mean in terms of assessment. As a consequence, issues of assessment always
arise during the initial café conversation on how we
can create a learning organization experience.
What lies behind the qualms students feel? By thetime they have reached post-graduate level they haveusually experienced assessment based on group
work. Often, their experience has been a difficult
one leaving many feeling they were exploited by lessable or less motivated students in the same group.
Because assessment is a high stakes activity they tend
to avoid too much diversity in the group for fear thatproblems with communication or other differences
will be an obstacle to success.

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Further, one of the safeguards
against exploitation is the powerof the teacher. The value of command and control learning is thatit operates to ensure equity. Thechanges outlined above leave
many students feeling vulnerable.
The first time I ran the course
these issues surfaced in the opening conversation and the concernsof students became apparent toeveryone present. Fortunately, a
student suggested – somewhat
jokingly – a strategy that dissolves the problem.
The traditional approach tograding student work is, of course,
to have students present theirwork to an expert teacher who
arrives at a grade by judging the work against“expert” standards and the work of other students.
The proposed strategy was that we take grades outof play by negotiating the grades before the students
undertake the work. Groups of students who arewilling to commit to extending themselves during
the course, working hard and being open to feedback are able to negotiate an “A” grade. Groups canalso opt to put in a less committed effort and beawarded a “C” grade, though in the ten years thecourse has run no group has taken this option.
The impact on students is remarkable. The interference7 associated with assessment evaporates, andstudents engage fully with the process of learning.
This occurs even when the group work is in an area
they find difficult, such as Systems Thinking. Students
are also far more open to feedback, seeking an indepth critique of their work safe in the knowledge
that they will learn from, rather than be punishedfor, any errors found.
Usually at assessment time it is the student whobears all the risk. They are at risk of being penalisedby factors outside their control, including the ignorance or capriciousness of teachers. With thisapproach I, as the teacher, also bear some of the risk

EKF ■ Ramsey 33

that the course will not produce the results we arehoping for. And the risk is minimized for me in that,
if it is evident that a group has not lived up to its sideof the negotiated agreement I do not have to award
the grade.
These issues are all discussed openly by the classas a whole. And in ten years over 60 groups have
responded with remarkable levels of enthusiasm andgoodwill which is sustained throughout the five daysof the course and in the weeks following. Every year
I am confident that the grades awarded represent
outstanding work on the part of students. Students
report that they have not previously experienced
such satisfying collaboration in a university course.
Of course, not everything runs smoothly in termsof assessment. On one occasion a group became
somewhat dysfunctional: key members decided thatto truly deserve the A grade they needed to ensure
the presentation was perfect and consequently madechoices where they sacrificed understanding andlearning for a veneer of competence. In subsequent
years I have been much more explicit in describing
the environment we are going to create and the needfor all members of groups to be fully engaged withthe work being undertaken.
During this period there have also been times
when I have felt that the grades are higher thanwould have been awarded by an objective assessor. I
view this as an “academic trade-off.” I am prepared
to trade-off a little objectivity in order to create an
outstanding learning experience for students. I view
this as no worse than trading off student’s learning
experiences and the validity of assessment processes
in order to attain a degree of objectivity. Indeed,because my university’s charter explicitly encourages
innovation, teaching quality and life-long learningand makes no mention of objective assessment (anunspoken value) I believe I have good reason to
make such a trade-off from time to time.

There is no need to go too far
It is an exhilarating relief to exhale after you haveheld your breath for some time. It would be wrong
to think, though, that this relief is proof that exhal-

34 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

ing is superior to inhaling. The feelings highlight theneed for both, and the dangers of suppressing either.
I am aware that the student reaction I haveenjoyed happens as a consequence of the context.
The values represented in my course are enjoyed by
students, not because they are better than traditional
university values, but rather because they have been
missing. I also need to ensure that the traditional
values of expertise, individual accomplishment andobjectivity are also present in my work.
Students studying organizational learning do not
feel that every aspect of the course must reflect thevalues present during the week-long course. The
negotiated assessment represents 40% of the final
grade they receive on the course. The remaining
60% is completed individually and a full range of
grades are awarded, depending on student performance. Interestingly, the relationship establishedduring the week of the course influences student
reactions to subsequent assessment: students continue to welcome feedback and it is rare to have a student challenge a grade. I believe this reaction reflects
the desire of students to both work collaboratively
and be recognized for their personal achievements.
Understanding this need for balance prevents mefrom crusading to have other courses in my College
adopt the same processes. I believe that students
learn more about organizational learning by experiencing the difference between my course and thoserun on more traditional lines. It is the same difference people experience when they move from ahighly prescriptive, bureaucratic role into an innovative and collaborative team environment.

Lessons Yet to Be Learned
In undertaking the work described earlier I havedeliberately acted in ways that run counter to theprevailing culture of my university. Even though thishas enabled me to create the experience I want for
my students, there is a price to pay. I am still looking
for ways to “have my cake and eat it too”: to run acourse that is culturally different, and also acceptedwithin the culture of the university.

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When I began working on the course I recognized
the danger of having my strategies and the course
itself rejected by the college. I chose to operate as a“skunkworks”: staying quiet about any experimentation and letting people judge the course on its
reputation among students.
In recent years the college I work in has become
deeply concerned with issues of academic accreditation and, therefore, with teaching quality. Predictably,rather than viewing student reaction to the course as
evidence of a quality learning experience, the college
Examination Committee8 has viewed the betterthan-usual grades achieved by students as an indication that quality is being compromised.
The college has held to the traditional view thatthe way to ensure quality is to have only a small
proportion of students in any class, achieve grades of
distinction. One consequence of this is that assessment processes are designed to generate the right
distribution of grades rather than to enhance learning or the experience students have while studying.
Further, the traditional view encourages a view thatteaching quality is the result of externally derived
standards, rather than emanating from the identity
and integrity of the teacher.9
When taken-for-granted assumptions are chal-

reflections.solonline.org

lenged people express their concerns in a variety ofways. With the organizational learning course, thishappens when people learn that all students areawarded the same grade for a piece of assessed
work.
Some academics express the view that the only
justification for a non-standard grade distribution isthat there has been an “exceptional year”: one inwhich a higher proportion of able students take theparticular course. This view perpetuates a belief that,of all the variables influencing student achievement,
the only one that truly matters is the innate potential
of individual students; “A Students” will get As and“C Students” will get Cs. Those expressing the view
do not accept that exceptional teaching or the creation of an exceptional learning environment could
influence student achievement. Nor do they see thata policy that requires distinctions to be madebetween students becomes self-fulfilling: teachers areforced to design “valid” assessment practices, withvalidity determined by whether they produce thesame distinctions as those being made in more traditional courses.
Concern has been expressed that giving all students the same mark creates problems of equity
between those in the class: that more capable stu-

EKF ■ Ramsey 35

dents are likely to feel aggrieved that they are awarded the same grade as their less capable classmates.
This concern ignores the evidence generated by theorganizational learning course: assessment practices
have been the subject of open conversation in everyclass, using a café conversation technique that
ensures all students are involved, and despite thistransparency there has never been a student complaint regarding inequity in the assessment.
A related concern is that problems of equity arecaused between courses: students may be punishedfor enrolling in some courses rather than others. To
my mind, this concern expresses a desire to concentrate on one outcome of university education to the
exclusion of other outcomes. University qualifications are used by some to make judgements between
graduates; employers, for instance, may select people
on the basis of the grades they achieve. Another outcome of university education is for students to havehigh quality learning experiences. Where possible wecan aim to achieve both these outcomes, otherwisesome balance between the two is needed. It would be
ultimately damaging to pursue one to the exclusionof the other, particularly if the one excluded (qualityof teaching) is the direct work of the university.
Finally, some argue that, if all students are awarded the same grade on a piece of work, there is little
point in having that work count toward the final
grade. This view is based on a belief that the primary
purpose of grading is to distinguish between students
rather than to recognize accomplishment. Further, if
I were to adopt it in my organizational learning
course, I would be signalling to students that
although collaboration is at the heart of organizational learning, collaborative work on my course is
not as highly valued as individual work.

Culture Change
When people raise these concerns and arguments
they do so because they are genuinely concerned
about issues of quality. They are not aware that theirarguments are based on taken-for-granted assumptions or that those are a product of the academic

36 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

culture. Rather, they are expressing what they believe
to be self-evident: that experimenting with grades as
I have done is likely to be harmful to the integrity of
the university. The challenge for me is to find a way
for the university to accept that other values can beincorporated into its activities.
How might this be done? It requires finding ways toreframe the work I am doing so that it comes intoalignment with existing values and assumptions.
As discussed earlier, a particularly powerful value inuniversity culture is that of giving status to people
with expertise. Interestingly, many people within theuniversity community support moves away fromrigid application of grade distributions because it
conflicts with their expert knowledge. People withexpertise in areas such as Quality Management,
Human Resource Development, and Performance
Management Systems can see flaws in the traditional
approach to assessment and grading.

Conclusion
The nature of organizational learning creates challenges in many cultures. Organizational learning
recognises that the structural issues in the design oforganizations prevent them from achieving theresults they really want. Organizational learning
encourages people to be experimental; to examine
assumptions and values that have previously beentaken for granted. Work in the organizational learning area naturally brings us into conflict with existing cultures.
My efforts to teach organizational learning – andto put organizational learning concepts to work in
my teaching – has generated both opportunities forlearning and conflict with university processes. The
university context provides an opportunity for learners to experience the exhilaration of organizational
learning. The challenge is to ensure that experiments
are not rejected as having no place in the university
culture.
It seems to me that the challenge is worth theeffort. For organizational learning to thrive, it needs
to be taught in the university context. And, whenreflections.solonline.org

taught, we can do more than teaching students aboutorganizational learning while sticking to traditional
methods. We can engage learners in organizational
learning processes and communities. We can go
beyond cognitive transfer of information and create
environments that influence people’s aspirations andvalues.

5

For an explanation of Core Group Theory see Art
Kleiner’s book Who Really Matters (New York: Currency
Doubleday, 2003).

6	 Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott and William
Snyder write about these challenges in their book
Cultivating Communities of Practice (Harvard Business
School Press, 2002).
7

Timothy Gallwey discusses interference in his book
The Inner Game of Work (New York: Random House,

Endnotes
1

2

3This insight is courtesy of a talk in which Peter Senge

8	 In keeping with the cultural values we have discussed,

quoted Gregory Bateson as saying that “the cause ofeven though the University Charter espouses a desire

all our problems is the gap between how we think andto be characterised by teaching quality, innovation andhow nature works.”

lifelong learning, the College of Business does not

I discuss the connection between culture and organi-

have any Committee charged with ensuring those val-zational learning in the article “Learning to beues are addressed. The Examinations Committee isComplete,” Reflections, 3, 1, 49-56.

the only formally constituted body designed to address

Culturally speaking, the assessment processes arematters of quality, which it does by reviewing grade

an artefact of the culture, reflecting its values in a waythat may go unrecognized by those in the academic
42000).

distributions.
9	 Parker J. Palmer discusses how the “inner landscape”

community.

of the teacher acts as the source of teaching quality

Jerry Harvey has written about this paradoxical aspectin his book The Courage to Teach (San Francisco:of academic life in his essay “Encouraging Future

Jossey-Bass, 1998).

Managers to Cheat.” It is published in his book The
Abilene Paradox and Other Meditations on Management(San Diego CA: University Associates, 1988).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr. Phil Ramsey teaches Organizational Learning at Massey University in New Zealand and is
the author the popular Billibonk series of stories designed to teach systems thinking (published by
Pegasus Communications). He is also a director of Incite Learning Ltd, a company that works withleaders in K-12 schools, helping them develop skills in change, culture and conversation.
P.L.Ramsey@massey.ac.nz

reflections.solonline.org

EKF ■ Ramsey 37

emerging knowledge forum

Context Tension:

Cultural Influences on Leadership andManagement Practice
Nadine Mendelek Theimann, Kurt April, and Eddie Blasshowever, because many Africans
find they have to sacrifice theirauthenticity in order to fully embrace such Western ideals. Thishighlights the need to understandthe African context and, in particular, the perspective of the African
worker.
African theories are seldom capNadine Mendelek
Eddie Blass
Kurt April
Theimanntured in literature, and specifically
The canon of knowledge in the fields of management
not in organizational literature – rather, the “Africanand leadership has been developed from WesternWay” has been to pass down the wisdom of the ages
capitalist principles, with leading thinkers in the field
through the oral tradition. This no longer appears
being mainly of American or European descent.
sufficient, as many Africans, particularly educated
These ideas have then been “exported” beyond
and skilled Africans, have been drawn to urban lifeWestern boundaries as trade has expanded globally, styles, separating them from the traditional forms ofand practices such as international outsourcing have oral transfer and placing them in direct contact withbecome more widespread. Although some areas of
the Western organizational norms and cultures that
Asia, particularly India, may be willing to adapt to dominate many of their employing organizations.
some of these Western practices, other areas of Asia,
and Africa as a whole, are not so willing. We offer acontextual understanding and comparison of leader- From Convergence and Divergence
ship and management practices in Western and to “Crossvergence” Perspectives
African contexts to provide some explanation as to Increased international business activity and emphawhy such practice needs to be modified if it is to be sis on globalization have rekindled interest in the
successful outside the Western context in which it
convergence/divergence debate among organizations.
was conceived.
The convergence thesis maintains that economic

Understanding the African Context
The West has supplied leadership and management
ideas, political systems, and economic infrastructures to Africa from colonial times to the present.
Most Western theories used in organizations in
Africa have not achieved their desired outcomes,

38 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4ideology drives cultural values, such that exposure toWestern ways of engaging in business will result in
the adoption of Western values (Ralston et al.,1993). This suggests that a society’s value systems
respond to technological advances, rather than toindigenous cultural forces. As a result, industrialized
nations will develop common values in the realm of
economic activity and work-related behavior. Culture,reflections.solonline.org

therefore, is treated merely as something accidental
that could have been different.
The divergence perspective, on the other hand,recognizes national and cultural differences. Its proponents maintain that culture is deeply rooted anddrives the values of any society beyond economic
ideology. The divergence perspective is consistent
with the dominant view of some cross-cultural theorists (e.g., Hofstede, 1980, 1991; Adler, 2002) who
emphasize that all management practices are in largepart culturally determined, although there is little
consensus on the significance of particular culturalvariables.
Hence a third perspective has developed: crossvergence, based on acculturation theory within the fieldof anthropology. Ward et al. (1999) and Ralston etal. (1993) proposed that when two cultures meet, a
blending of values may result. The crossvergence
perspective therefore recognizes the importance ofeconomic ideology and national culture, as well as
the importance of the synergetic interaction between
the two. Moreover, it is consistent with a more balanced perspective of global integration and local
responsiveness. Country-specific characteristics, suchas culture, socioeconomics, political-legal climate,
and technological factors, however, influence themeaning, interpretation, and implementation of theforeign practices in these organizations. Understanding
these characteristics is necessary before crossvergence can be achieved. The influences of other cultures tend to lead to the development of a new
hybrid value system, rather than a convergence ofvalue systems.
A common sense of identity within the emerging
hybrid culture may be manifested as agreement on
what the current situation in the organization is, interms of organizational and management attributes;
what the ideal situation is, in terms of management
style and such organizational factors as hierarchy,
decision-making process, and control; and how theideal contrasts with the way these aspects are likely
to change. Logically, organizations are likely to
evolve in a positive way if the various stakeholders
concur on these fundamental matters.

reflections.solonline.org

Creating a Hybrid fromDifferent Roots
The root difference between Western and African
cultural perspectives stems from the principles on
which they learn and develop throughout their lives.
The Western world adopts a primarily scholastic
approach based on facts, logic, and the nature of
reality, whereas the African approach is based inhumanism.
In Western Europe, humanism originated in the
study of classical culture and was part of theRenaissance that took place in the 14th and 15th
centuries. It got its name from one of the era’s mostimportant goals: the promotion of a new educational
curriculum. This curriculum consisted of studia
humanitatis, or the humanities, a group of academic
subjects concerning the human condition. Humanities
subjects included grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry,and ethics. These disciplines were all studied, whenever possible, in the original classical texts and witha qualitative approach. The humanities curriculum
conflicted with more traditional education that was
based on scholasticism. Scholastic education concentrated on more “factual” subjects, such as logic,
natural philosophy (science), and metaphysics, or thenature of reality. Scholars often clashed sharply overthese two systems of education. A lot was at stake inthese academic controversies, which were, and stillare, related to the question “What is education for?”African humanism is embodied in ritual, story,
cultural practices, symbolism, and myth, and takes
the human being as the starting point, emphasizing the
dignity and worth of the individual. A basic premiseof humanism is that human beings possess withinthemselves the capacity for truth and goodness.
We are currently in a perverse situation in which
the West is traversing a path toward a more humanistic approach, particularly in business and government, while Africa is being criticized for not being
scholastic enough, be it in business, government, or
society. Modern Africa still stresses the importanceof human needs, both on an individual basis and,more importantly, on a collective basis. African

EKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 39

During the colonial period in Africa, people and employees were treated in a transactional or instrumental manner. They were seen as cogs in the machinery of business,a means to an end, to be exploited solely for the betterment of business (exemplified in
the term: “human resources”). A new “post-instrumental” form of communal humanism(different from the individualism and transactional approaches so dominant duringcolonial times) has the potential to build an inclusive competitive advantage.
humanism requires interconnected individuals tocontribute to the welfare of the society in which they
reside. This is Africa’s gift to the world: social leadership within a context of humanistic citizenship. Thisapproach may not be the most expedient or efficient,
but it promises a more sustainable society.
This is unlikely to be a purely African phenomenon. There is evidence, from India (Jackson, 2002),
for example, that hybrid human resource development systems are being designed to manage Western(instrumental) and Indian (humanistic) orientations
in organizations. Their applicability in other regions,such as sub-Saharan Africa, needs to be investigated.
The Japanese (holistic) management approach has
also provided systems of management in East Asia
that appear to be successful in collectivist societies,
and they, too, may have some parallels with African
societies. The influence of Asian management collectivist philosophy has to be taken into consideration, since Asian businsess have made significant
investments (particularly in South Africa) in recent
years. Ahiauzu (1986, p. 54) points out that “though
he may work in industry, the African lives in a wider
society; and it is from this society outside the workplace that the elements that constitute the framework
within which the African indigenous thought-system
operates derive.” This “thought system” includes
features like a high degree of harmony between
humans and the world around them, the use ofsymbolism to make sense of the world, a spiritualconnection to something larger than the individual,
the use of an oral tradition for passing on collective
wisdom, and a strong emphasis on family and theimmediate community. The importance of family isvisible in the network of interrelationships, extended

40 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4family and mutual obligations, similar to the paternalism found in Thai organizations (Kamoche, 2000).
This results in a sense of communalism and traditionalism (Nzelibe, 1986; Onyemelukwe, 1973), which
is not unlike the Confucian influence on Asian cultures (Horwitz, Kamoche & Chew, 2002).
What do such hybrid models look like in practice?
How do they differ from the Western management
models? Jackson (2004) identified three dominant
types of management organizations in Africa: (1)post-colonial, (2) post-instrumental, and (3) African
renaissance. By analyzing each of these three systems, we will illustrate how they can lead to potential and actual conflicts in the workplace. The
analysis will address issues of cross-cultural management in African countries, while demonstrating how
a combination of features from the three models
could give rise to hybrid management models.

Post-Colonial Leadership andManagement Systems
Leadership/management in Africa is typically represented in the literature as fatalistic, resistant tochange, reactive, short-term-oriented, authoritarian,risk-reducing, and context-dependent, with decision
making based on external criteria. Kiggundu (1989),
for example, describes organizations as typicallyhaving these characteristics: understaffing of competent people; poor motivation; risk aversion; workers
unwilling to take independent action; close supervision of subordinates with little delegation; inefficient operations; overstaffing of nonqualified personnel; underutilization of capacity; poor pay; andlow morale, indicated by high turnover and absen-

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teeism. Top leaders and managers are likely to be
overworked, while reluctant to delegate work, andare generally learned, articulate, and well traveled.
However, at the middle-management level is inadequate managerial expertise and skills, combined witha lack of industrial knowledge. Blunt & Jones (1992,
1997) also represent such a system.
Jackson (2004) argues that this representation of
African management in the literature is mostly representative of a post-colonial heritage, reflecting a
Theory X style of management, in McGregor’s(1960) terminology, which generally mistrusts humannature and asserts a need to impose controls on
workers, allowing little worker initiative and individually rewarding a narrow set of skills simply byfinancial means. This system was imposed on African
society originally by the colonial powers, and has
been perpetuated since Africa gained political inde-reflections.solonline.org

pendence (but often not economic independence),
perhaps as a result of vested political and economic
interests, or perhaps purely because this was the way
managers in the colonial era were trained. This kindof system typically lacks clear, community/stakeholder-endorsed mission statements or any sense ofshared direction. Poor business results follow, andleadership is viewed as detached, highly centralized,
hierarchical, and authoritarian. Table 1 illustrates
how this Western ideal of leadership is viewed by theauthors as operating in its “ideal” state, in East
Asia, and in Africa.
In the African context, “leadership” and “management” are socially constructed concepts that
contrast with the individual Western construct of“the leader/manager,” as explained by Hogg’s (2001)“social identity theory of leadership.” According to
Hogg (p. 184), “group identification, as self-categorization, constructs an intra-group prototypicality gradient that invests themost prototypical member with theappearance of having influence; theappearance arises because members
cognitively and behaviorally conformto the prototype” (i.e., the person who
behaves the most to “type” is deemed
to be the leader of that type). Because
most multinational managers and highly skilled Africans take their intra-groupnorms from the previously colonial
West, it is they who are ascribed theapparent influence as leaders. African
employees then seek to emulate them inculture and behavior, often suppressing
or denying their authentic selves (at acost). Hence the belief in modern, urban
Africa that the “work person” is separate from the “home person” – a belief
that undermines the roots of African
humanistic society.
Hogg further argues that the group
becomes divided by status into leader/managers and followers. In time, a charismatic leadership/managerial personality

EKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 41

Table 1. Comparison of Elements of the Western “Ideal” Leadership with East Asian and African Paradigms
Element

Current Western Leadership“Ideal”

Leadership in East Asia

Leadership in Africa

Influenceson leadership
practices• Paramount concern
for organizational
performance• Drive for efficiency andcompetitiveness• Urgency induced by shortterm economic model• Dependent on followers
for operational
effectiveness• Individualistic• Emphasis on capital
markets• Maintenance of harmony
fundamental• Attention to social
networks and particularlyfamilial networks• Consensus valued• Respect for seniority, age,experience• Expectation that managerial
authority will be exercisedwith concern for country
and community• Highly centralized power structures• High degrees of tension as management seeks clarity and control
against employee comfort inuncertainty and ambiguity• Emphasis on control mechanisms
rather than organizational
performance• Bureaucratic resistance to change• Acute resource scarcity• Individual concern for basic security• Stakeholder focus• Importance of extended family
and kin networks

Managing
authority• Relative equality of authority and status between
manager and subordinates• Delegation/
decentralization• Teamwork• “Empowerment”• Leadership from the top• Respect for seniority• Goals set by top
management• Acceptance of wide powerand status differentials
between managers andsubordinates• Authoritarian/ paternalistic
leadership patterns• Centralization• Bureaucratic controls• Preoccupation with rules andprocedures• Reluctance to judge individual
performance

Managing
uncertainty• High degree of conservatism and stability-seeking
behavior• Uncertainty accepted
as normal• Continuous change viewed
as natural• Sense of urgency• Deep-rooted, shared
theologies and philosophies
provide relative certainty
and security• Long-term view of evolving
change• Hierarchy and conformity
stressed• Collectivist mutual duties• High degree of toleranceof ambiguity• Change-resistant organizational
hierarchies, reinforced by
preoccupation with rules• Social networks crucial to provide
individual security

Managing
relationships• Trust superficial andoffered up-front. Deep trust
seldom offered.
• Tolerance of others• Openness valued• Open confrontationof differences• Open debate and conflictvalued Deep private
conversation anddialogue avoided• Support of followers
essential• Drive to secure commitment and high morale• Emphasis on maintenanceof harmony and personaldignity• Deep trust earned overtime. No offering of superficial trust• Persons valued over issues• Avoidance of confrontationand conflict• Open debate and conflict
avoided. Deep private
conversation and dialogue
valued• Maintenance of social
networks important• Openness to others• Deep trust earned over time.
No offering of superficial trust• Emphasis on harmony with others,
nature, and the spirit world• Confrontation and differences
privately dealt with
• Open debate and conflict avoided.
Deep private conversation anddialogue valued• Extended social networks importance for sustainability

42 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

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is attributed to the leader/manager group, whichfurther empowers them and sharpens the status differential. Hence the leader/manager develops a viewof the “followers” (employees) as a dependent grouphanging on their commands and knowledge. This
results in leaders’ seeking to limit organizationalrisk, which in practice means the implementation ofcontrols. Hence, in Africa, the emphasis is on control
mechanisms, rules, and procedures, rather than performance. Indeed, there is a high reluctance to judge
individual performance.
Table 2 illustrates how this post-colonial perspective on African management differs from the postinstrumental, African renaissance, and East Asian
perspectives. A spiral of copying Western behavior ina culture that values leadership differently leads to astrong control element, as can be seen in the table.
The character of such overly controlled organizations is also reflected in the local public sector, or
recently privatized local organizations that are notforeign-owned. This stems from the fact that muchof the public sector is led by the ex–war heroes/
political prisoners/exiles, etc., who led the politicalrevolutions for democracies in their home states.
Unfortunately, most of these people did not receive
any formal education in managing organizations.
When they have acquired such education, they haverarely had sufficient time to practice their skills andcompetencies. As a result, many are “learning-bydoing” (Gorelick et al., 2004). In addition, the public sector often finds it difficult to lure the mosttalented local employees away from the multinationals and the private sector.
Managers who fit in well in a post-colonial systemare expected to be motivated by power and economic security. Decisions are typically focused on
the past and present, rather than the future.
Management practices follow an authoritarian leadership style with reliance on hierarchy and a lack of
openness in communication and information giving.
Within post-colonial systems, management is oriented
toward internal processes and power relations.
Individuals’ perception about the control they
have over what happens to them is vital to theirreflections.solonline.org

understanding of how they live and what their meaning in the world is (Shapiro, Schwartz, & Astin,
1996), and can affect how new experiences change
the individual’s behavior. This perception is referred
to as “locus of control” and stems from their expectations about what will happen following a particular behavior (Rotter, Seeman, & Liverant, 1962).
Western culture promotes an internal locus-of-control orientation; people are expected to perceive
themselves as the active determiners of their fates
and accept full responsibility for their outcomes.
Over the years in Western society, the locus of control has become “good guys/bad guys,” with internality being substituted for “desirable, intelligent,and bright” and externality for “failure, dull, andinadequate” (Lefcourt, 1982, p. 182). The researchand practice in the area has been biased by the popular assumption that internal locus of control is apositive asset and externality is a deficit (Evans,
Shapiro, & Lewis, 1993). An internal locus of control became the “moral vision” of Western cultural
ideology (Christopher, 1996), whereas African culture generally features an external locus of control.
A useful alternative conceptualization of locus ofcontrol, in our attempt to find a crossvergence way
forward, is provided by Wong & Sproule (1984). In
their study, they noted the importance of distinguishing “realism” from “idealism,” suggesting that people’s reality tended to account for their externalscores, and their ideals tended to account for theirinternal scores. Building on this, it is possible to view
locus of control as involving a two-dimensionalview, such that dual control (or shared responsibility) can be described in terms of both internal andexternal control. Individuals who understand control to be from both internal and external sources
could be considered to be “bilocals,” individuals
who strike a healthy balance between beliefs in internal and external control. Wong & Sproule (1984)
hypothesized that bilocals cope more effectively
because they observe an optimal mix between personal responsibility (internal control) and reliance on
appropriate outside resources (external control).
Indeed, Gurin et al. (1978, p. 292) argued thatEKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 43

Table 2. Comparison of Different Organizational Management Systems in Africa
Post-Colonial

Post-Instrumental

African Renaissance

East Asian/JapaneseMain
principles• Theory X• Western/post-independence
African• Instrumental• Theory Y• Western/”modern”• Functionalist• Humanistic• Ubuntu• Community collectivism• Humanistic• Corporate collectivism

Importance• Continuing legacy throughpolitical and economic
interests• Looked to as alternative• Influence from multinationals, management education, and consultants• Some elements may
prevail in indigenousorganizations• Of growing interest
internationally• Developing importancethrough East Asianinvestment• May be seen as alternative

Strategy• Input- and process-oriented• Lack of results andobjectives• Risk aversion• Results- and marketoriented• Clear objectives• Calculated risk taking• Stakeholder oriented• Market- and results-oriented• Clear objectives• Low risk-taking

Structure• Hierarchy• Centralized• Flatter hierarchy• Often decentralized• Flatter hierarchy• Decentralized and closer
to stakeholders• Hierarchy and conformity

Governanceand decision
making• Authoritarian• Non-consultative• Often consultative• Increasing emphasison empowerment• Participative, consensus
seeking (indaba)• Consultative but authority
from top

Control• Rule-bound• Lack of flexibility• Outside influence or control(family, government) often
seen as negative• Clear rules of action• Flexible• Outside government
influence decreasing• Benign rules of action• Outside influence (family, government) may beseen as more benign• Consensus and harmony
above formal rules• May lack flexibility

Character• May not act ethically toward
stakeholders• Not very efficient• Static• Probably not foreign owned

•
•
•
•

• Stakeholder interest may
be more important than“ethics”• Success related todevelopment and wellbeing of people• Indigenous• Harmony and “face” may be
more important than ethics• Efficiency• May be slow to changeInternal
policies• Discriminatory• Employee policies aimed
at duties rather than rights• Nondiscriminatory• Access to equal opportunities and clear employee
policies on responsibilities
and rights• Stakeholder interests• Access to equal
opportunities• Can be discriminatory(toward women)• Employee relations may
be more implicit

Internal
climate• Employee alienationcommon• Weak trade unions• Inter-ethnic friction• Discourages diversityof opinions• Promotion by ascription• Emphasis on employee
motivation• Weak or cooperative unions• Move toward inter-ethnic
harmony• Diverse opinions often
encouraged• Promotion based onachievement• Motivation throughparticipation important• Unions protect rights• Inter-ethnic harmony
taken into consideration• Everyone should be able
to state opinions• Promotion based on
legitimization of status• Aims at employee commitment (job satisfaction
may be low)
• Company trade unions• Inter-ethnic relations may
not be an issue• Consensus rather than diversity of opinions stressed• Promotion by seniority

External
policies• Lack of customer/client
policies• Lack of result orientation• Clear policies oncustomers/clients• Result orientation• A clear awareness ofand articulation of stakeholder interests• A focus on business andcustomer networks rather
than explicit policies

Management
expertise• Educated management
elite with low managerial
expertise• High, result-oriented managerial expertise sought• Management expertise
based on peopleorientation• Management effectivenessbased on collective skills

Peopleorientation• Control orientation• People and result
orientation• People and stakeholder
orientation• People (in-group) orientation

44 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4More ethically responsible
Aims to be successful
Change is a feature
Probably foreign-owned

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scores of greater externality on measures of locus ofcontrol among minority (oppressed) groups wereincorrectly interpreted in several reports as demonstrating that “cultural values and beliefs in external
forces needed to be altered, when in fact [subjects’]sense of low personal control reflected a correct perception of a harsh environment over which they had
little control.” Hence the importance of emphasizing
both internal and external aspects of control, insteadof only the benefits of internal (ascribed to Western
leaders/managers) or the distresses associated withexternal (ascribed mainly to African employees).
This is a sensible alternative to prevailing discussionsof locus of control, and fits within a crossvergence
perspective. In multicultural environments, bilocals
are expected to be better adjusted than controllers(those with internal control beliefs) and controllees(those with external control beliefs) in many ways
(Wong & Sproule, 1984).
Others (e.g., Hannerz, 1969; Valentine, 1971;
LaFromboise et al., 1993) have referred to theimpact of cultural acquisition and the creative tension between maintaining a balance between internaland external control as “biculturalism.” The concepts of bilocals and biculturalism are key to making
sense of the collective behavior and social life, as
well as the individual and work life, of the African
community. Members of the community draw upon
both a distinctive repertoire of standardized Africangroup behavior and, simultaneously, patterns derived
from the mainstream cultural system of Western
derivation. For most Africans, socialization in bothof the systems begins at an early age, at home and inschool and through the mass media, and continues
throughout life – and therefore the two are of equal
importance.

Post-Instrumental Management
Systems
When Western human resource practices are implemented in cultures that have a different regard forpeople in organizations, these incompatibilities canresult in a lack of motivation in the workplace, lead-reflections.solonline.org

ing to low productivity and labor strife. Followers
may prefer a leader who is kindly, considerate, andunderstanding to one who is overly dynamic andproductive, and possibly too demanding. There is no
assumption here (as there is with the post-colonial
management systems) that the followers are lazy,need controlling, and have an external focus. Herethe assumption is that the objective of development
is to make the “developing” world more like the“developed” one through industrialization, and that
this goal should be reflected in the direction of organizational change and the way people are managed.
“Most organizations have been primarily shaped by
the narrow range of perspectives and experiences ofWestern European, white, heterosexual, physicallyable-bodied males” (Weber, 1993, p. 93). This isreflected in a trend wherein Western approaches tomanagement are imported into African countries
either through multinational companies; Westerngoverned institutions like the WTO, IMF, and World
Bank; or African managers who are increasingly
being educated with Western-style leadership andmanagement curricula (in Africa and abroad). Thisview is quite different from that of African culture,and the contrast between the two views of training
and development are illustrated in Table 3.
An opportunity exists within the post-instrumental management system for a crossvergence hybrid
model to emerge. Africans can extract useful Westernknowledge while discarding dysfunctional practices,and combine the result with context-appropriate
native insights and knowledge, thereby creating aunique hybrid. This also affords the West, and its
institutions, the opportunity to enrich its own perspectives and reconstitute its organizations along the
hybrid model, providing they are prepared “… to be
shaped by more diverse cultures and perspectives,[then] there is every reason to expect that organizations will change” (Weber, 1993, p. 93).
Valuing diversity in African workplaces seems to
be compatible with stressing common goals andstandards, provided the attention to diversity is notallowed to undermine the emphasis on community
and what the community stands for. Since African

EKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 45

employees are engaged in common effort rather than
individual effort, organizational processes andhuman resource practices and policies should seek toguide behavior standards that address the collective
effort (shared goals, shared rewards, shared performance standards, shared operating norms, and soforth). Yet Africa is far from one large, harmonious
community. There are frictions and tensions between
sub-communities as exist between different ethnic
groups all around the world. The challenge becomesfinding the right balance between the humanistic collective orientation of the community and the different ethnicities and communities within the nation-stateor even within the African Union. “If we do notrecover and identify with the particularities of ourcommunity, then we shall lose what it is we have tocontribute to the common culture. We shall havenothing to bring, nothing to give. But if each of usdwells too much, or even exclusively, upon his or her
ethnic particularity, then we are in danger of fragmenting and even destroying the common life”(Alasdair MacIntyre, quoted in Quay, 1991).
There is also a need in Africa for skills development that will allow individuals to contribute theirbest to the collective cause, rather than skills development for individual gain. In the West, the focus isTable 3. Contrast between Western and African View of Training
Western

African• Individual responsibility for self-actualization• Group-determined self-actualization• Learning viewed as an individual problem-solving process
toward positivistic reality, involving puzzlement, perturbation,even discomfort for the learner. Knowledge is to be hoarded
as a source of power, and the tension of “not knowing” isskillfully managed at an individual level• Learning is viewed as a group-responsibility process toward
constructivist reality, involving risk avoidance for the groupbut acquisition of additional information on an individuallevel. Collectivist nature of social relationships, whichenables compromised group goals• Individual agency in social relationships, which enables
maximized organizational goals• Self-confidence in individual’s relationship with his/herstakeholder group, thereby ensuring positive individual
affirmation• Self-confidence in individual’s relationship with his/her
employing organization, thereby ensuring positive individual
affirmation• Heightened awareness of hierarchical levels withinorganizations mainly, as well as deference to organizational
authority• Education is seen as a way to enhance both individual
status and personal growth• A view of the professional as an individual of independentjudgment• The value of self-discovered knowledge as opposed toprescribed knowledge from an early age – and knowledge
is to be used for one’s own advancement• The power of the teacher rests in his/her expert knowledge,
information, and skills. An emerging view of the teacherlearner relationship as involving interdependence and growing equality as learner approximates teacher’s knowledge• Heightened awareness of hierarchical levels within and outside organizations, and deference to tribal/familial authority• Education is seen as a way to enhance individual status,
rather than for personal growth• A view of the professional as better able to make interdependent judgments• The value of prescribed knowledge from an early age, with
self-discovered knowledge emerging with maturity – andknowledge is to be used for the group’s advancement• The power of the teacher is ascribed to him/her by virtue of
his/her position. View of the teacher-learner relationship as
one in which the learner stays dependent and cannot easily
achieve equality with the teacher• Development as involving group risk and individual change
for learners, but reward is potential group prosperity• Development as involving individual risk and change forlearners, but reward is potential individual prosperity• Training viewed as a threat rather than an opportunity if
it involves an admission of group ignorance and groupshortcomings• Training viewed as an opportunity even if it involves, withina trusting training context, the admission of individual
ignorance and shortcomings• Increasing degree of openness, as trust is developed overa long period of time (among everyone, and as an explicit
goal)• Increasing degree of openness, as trust is assumed
up-front in relationships (mainly among peers)
Source: Authors, and adapted from Jones (1989), Jackson (2002)

46 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

reflections.solonline.org

on getting teamwork/communal behavior eventhough individuals are individually competent.
Africans need to be empowered with individual skills
and competencies, in order to work for the benefit ofall. However, the paradoxical nature of Africa’s
dilemma is that although there is a humanistic, communal focus, no wide-scale agreement exists as towhat the common good or venture should be. So
separate groups muddle along, each working toward
its own goals and values, without either harming orcontributing to the success of neighbor communities.
This runs counter to the Western market philosophies of survival of the fittest, mean and lean organizational paradigms, or pulling together for thecommon good of the organization. It is expected,
almost taken for granted, that African organizations
will not pull together because of ethnic or familybased rifts. Hence what may appear to a Westernobserver of African organizations to be “irrational”
merely reflects a set of values that differ from thoseof the West.

reflections.solonline.org

The African Renaissance System
Taking a divergent stance and rejecting Western
ideals more or less completely, some African authors
have called for a return to African values and indigenous knowledge systems (Stremlau, 1999; Ajulu,
2001; Mbeki et al., 2004). This movement for an
African renaissance follows the precepts of Ubuntu.
Literally translated, Ubuntu means “I am who I am
through others.” Mbigi (1997) has more specificallyset about defining and elaborating the management
philosophy of Ubuntu, which is based on the senseof community.
Key values can be summarized as follows:• Sharing: A need for security in the face of hardship has prompted a commitment to helping
one another. This value is not based on simple
exchange, but is a result of a network of social
obligations, based predominantly on kinship.
• Deference to rank: Although traditional rulers
gained their titles by senior lineage, they had to

EKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 47

Table 4: Comparison of Different Management Attributes in Africa
Post-Colonial

Post-Instrumental

African Renaissance

East Asian/JapaneseManagement
motivators• Economic security• Control

•
•
•
•
•

Managing uncertainty
Self-enhancement
Autonomy
Independence
Achievement• Belonging• Development of
personal and group• Belonging• Development incorporate context• Elements of economic
security

Management
commitment• To businessobjectives• To relatives• To organization

•
•
•
•

To self
To results
To ethical principles
To work• To group• To people

•
•
•
•

Management
principle• External locus
of control• Deontology• Theory X• Mistrust of humannature• Status orientation• Internal locus
of control• Teleology• Theory Y• Conditional trustof human nature• Achievement
orientation• Internal and external
locus of control• Trust of human nature• Status and achievement orientation• External locus
of control• Theory Y (in-group),
Theory X (out-group)• Trust of in-groupmembers• Relational aspects
of decision making• Status throughseniority

Management
practices• Reliance on hierarchy• Low egalitarianism• Lack of open
communication• Lack of open
information• Some participation• Mostly communicating
openly• Providing open
information whennecessary• Confrontational• Participation• Egalitarianism• Communicating
openly• Providing open
communication• Consultative• Communicating andinformation sharing
to gain consensus• Maintaining harmonyMainorientations• Managing process• Managing power
relations• Managing results(external focus)• Managing people• Managing people(internal stakeholder
focus)• Managing results(defined by stakeholder interests)• Managing people(in-group/out-grouprelations)• Managing results(defined by stakeholder interests)

To business objectives
To results
To work
To relatives

Source: Jackson (2002)

earn the respect of their followers and rule byconsensus. People were free to express opinions and dissension. At the same time, taking
one’s proper place in the social scale is an
important aspect of the virtue of humility andlegitimization of status.
• Sanctity of commitment: Commitment andmutual obligations stem from group pressures
to meet one’s promises and to conform tosocial expectations (this appears as obligations
to stakeholders noted in Table 2).
• Regard for compromise and consensus: The
main characteristic of traditional African leadership is that of a chief who personifies theunity of the tribe and who must live the values

48 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4of his community in an exemplary way without
being an autocrat. The chief must rely on representatives of the people to assist him, in order
to be guided by consensus. Failure to do sowould result in his people ignoring his decisions and law. The people are strongly represented, with a duty to attend court hearings,
and all have a responsibility to one another toensure the laws are upheld. As a result of thiscollective responsibility, everyone has the rightto question in open court.
• The concept of openness: An important valuethat implies that nobody should receive retribution for anything said correctly in an open
forum. In Table 2, this is reflected in structuresreflections.solonline.org

that have flatter hierarchies, consensus-seeking
decision making, an internal climate of participation and openness, and protection of rights.
Management practice also reflects a participative, egalitarian, and open approach.
• Good social and personal relations: Commitment
to social solidarity. The tensions of management/labor relations that have been a feature in
African organizations can be attributed largely
to a lack of human dimension and the adversarial attitudes of colonial employment relations.
A comparison of the management attributes associated with each of the three African management
systems and the East Asian system are presented inTable 4.
Whereas the post-colonial system seeks to impose
Western ideals on African culture, the African renaissance model seeks to reject such ideas and return toa cultural context untouched by industrializationand the expansion of capitalism. This may be appealing to many in Africa, but it is an unrealistic ambition, as the colonial history and influence cannot be
erased.

Where Do We Go from Here?
For a management system to operate successfully in
the African context, it must take account of the cultural roots and history within which the organization is seeking to operate. We have outlined three
approaches that can be taken: a post-colonialapproach that seeks to impose Western ideas on

Africa; the post-instrumental approach, which seeks
to “improve” Africa with Western developments; andthe African renaissance approach, which seeks toreject Western ideas. Such normative aims will neversucceed if the community that is being “improved”
does not welcome the intervention as improvement.
Equally, the African renaissance approach that seeks
to remove the Western influence and return to African cultural roots will not succeed, because history
cannot be erased, and the influence of the multinationals and globalization are not going to recede.
This leaves us seeking a middle ground that considers both the different and the overlapping systems
stemming from the influence of diverse post-colonial
systems and their different operating versions (Portuguese, Belgian, French, Dutch, English, German,
Arabic, etc.) on the one hand, and the interaction
with post-instrumental systems represented by various multinationals present on the African continent(North American, European, and Asian companies)
on the other hand – while first focusing on the
African values and thought system in order to understand their impact on the working behavior of
African leaders and managers. Such a hybrid, crossvergence management system not only could be theway forward for management in Africa, but also
may be the way forward for the developed world as
it struggles to embrace the complexities of diversitythat are arising from globalization. Perhaps it is time
for the canon of knowledge in management andleadership to shift to Africa.

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Blunt, P., & Jones, M.L. (1992) Managing Organisations in Africa, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
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Christopher, J.C. (1996) “Counseling’s Inescapable Moral Visions,” Journal of Counseling & Development, Vol. 75,
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Horwitz, F., Kamoche, K., & Chew, I.K.H. (2002) Looking East: Diffusing High Performance Work Practices in theSouthern Afro-Asian Context (Paper presented at the 3rd African Regional Congress of the International
Industrial Relations Association, Cape Town, South Africa, 6–8 March 2002, pp. 1-19).
Jackson, T. (2002) International HRM: A Cross-Cultural Approach, London: Sage.
Jackson, T. (2004) Management and Change in Africa: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, London: Routledge.
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Academic Press, pp. 309-360.

A bo u t t h e A u t h o r s

Dr. Nadine Theimann gained extensive international experience as an economist and program
manager for the United Nations Development Program. She has lived in many different countries,
and completed case studies of intercultural change management in foreign-owned companies in
Senegal and the Ivory Coast. She is multicultural and multilingual with fluency in French, English,
Norwegian and Arabic, as well as a working knowledge of Portuguese.
ntheimann@assalaconsulting.com
Dr. Kurt April is the author of seven books, 70 academic articles and lectures on Leadership,
Diversity and Inclusion at the Graduate School of Business (University of Cape Town, SA). He is an
Associate Fellow of Saïd Business School (University of Oxford, UK), Research Fellow of Ashridge(UK) and Visiting Professor of RSM Erasmus University (Netherlands).
kapril@iafrica.com
Dr. Eddie Blass is a senior researcher at the Ashridge Business School (Hertfordshire, UK), having
been a Senior Lecturer in Human Resource Management at the University of Derby, and a Research
Fellow at Cranfield University. She has been widely published in the academic press, and her
research focuses around two areas: education methods and processes, and the future of work.
eddie.blass@aol.com

reflections.solonline.org

EKF ■ Theimann, April, Blass 51

B ook E xcerpt

Conscious Business:
How to Build Value
Through Values

Conscious Business:

How to Build Value Through Values

Fred Kofman
Sounds True, 2006

In Conscious Business, author Fred Kofman, one of the original
members of the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT,argues that creating cultures of mutual learning is the foundation of organizational excellence. The techniques he introducesshow readers how to create such cultures through achieving
unconditional responsibility, unflinching integrity, authentic communication, impeccable commitments, and “right leadership.”Together, these help create a conscious business that producesFred Kofman

sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of
its community and the dignity of each member.

Foreword by Ken WilberT

he dictionary definition ofbusiness, dry and prosaic, is“occupation, work, trade,
commerce; serious, rightful, proper
endeavor.” Conscious means “having an awareness of one’s inner andouter worlds; mentally perceptive,
awake, mindful.” So “conscious business” might mean, engaging in an
occupation, work, or trade in a
mindful, awake fashion. This implies, of course, that many people
do not do so. In my experience, thisis often the case. So I would definitely be in favor of conscious business – or conscious anything, forthat matter.

That starts to sound interesting. Still, I wonder exactly what“conscious” or “mindful” mightmean, especially since under “conscious” we find the provocative
phrase, “aware of inner and outerworlds.” Just how many worlds
are there, and do I have to be
conscious of all of them in order
to be really conscious?

52 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4Here, I think, is where theentire idea of conscious businessstarts to become truly intriguing.
Worlds, terrains, landscapes, environments: It’s a big world, andthe better we understand thatworld – both inner and outer – thebetter our navigation of it will be.
A map of the outer world
would help; so would a map of
the inner world. Together theywould provide a tool that would
dramatically improve my navigation through any environment,
any world, including the world of
business. A comprehensive mapthat combined the latest knowledge of both inner and outerworlds would provide an extraordinary means for fulfilling any
goals that I might have. It would
also provide the key to being conscious of both inner and outerworlds. Conscious business – in fact,
conscious living – would start tobecome a very real possibility.

Big World, Big Map
A map, of course, is not the territory, and we definitely do notwant to confuse any map, no matter how comprehensive, with theterritory itself. At the same time,
we don’t want to have an inadequate, partial, broken map either.
The fact is, most human endeavors, including most business practices, operate with incomplete andoften misleading maps of humanpotentials. These partial and fractured maps of inner and outerrealities consistently lead to failures in both personal and professional endeavors.
In the past few decades there
has been, for the first time in history, a concerted effort to take allof the known maps of humanpotentials, both inner and outer,and combine them into a morecomprehensive, inclusive, andreflections.solonline.org

accurate map of reality. This “bigmap” – sometimes called an Integral Map – represents the mostcomprehensive and balanced overview to date, and as such offers an
unparalleled navigational aid in
defining and fulfilling virtually any
goals, personal or professional.
How comprehensive is this Big
Map? It started with an exhaustive cross-cultural comparison of
all the known interior maps offered by the world’s major cultures, including psychological maps
from Freud to Jung to Piaget;
Eastern maps, including thoseoffered by yoga, Buddhism, andTaoism; the extensive results ofcognitive science, neurobiology, andevolutionary psychology; typologies from the Enneagram to MyersBriggs; transformation tools fromancient shamans to postmodern
sages. The idea was simple: What
psychological map or model could
account for, and include, all of
those possibilities? Because humanbeings have in fact proposed all of
those various schools and systems, there must be a model comprehensive enough to account for
all of them, and the Integral
Model, as far as we can tell, does
exactly that.
The result in the interior domains is that there appears to be aspectrum of consciousness available to men and women. This
spectrum ranges from body tomind to spirit; from prerational torational to transrational; fromsubconscious to self-conscious tosuperconscious; from emotional
to ethical to spiritual. The point isthat all of those potentials – bodyto mind to spirit – are importantreflections.solonline.org

for a comprehensive approach to
any situation, personal or professional, because those realities arein fact operating in all humans inany event, and you either takethem into conscious account or
they will subconsciously sabotage
your efforts at every turn. This istrue in any human endeavor, frommarriage to business to education
to recreation.
In addition to these interior or
psychological realities, the Integral
Model also includes the mostrecent maps of the outer world,
maps offered by widely respected
empirical sciences from dynamic
systems theory to complexity andchaos theories. Combined withinterior maps, the result is indeed
an Integral Map of inner andouter worlds – a map that therefore is the measure of what itmeans to be really conscious.
Complex as this Integral Map
sounds (and is), it actually shakes
down into a handful of fairly
simple factors that can be quickly
mastered. The easiest way to summarize the Integral Map is that itcovers a spectrum of consciousness operating in both inner andouter worlds: the Integral Approach includes body, mind, andspirit in self, culture, and nature.
We have already briefly examined the first part of that equation– namely, “body, mind, and spirit” – which we saw as the spectrum of consciousness that constitutes the interior realities orworlds. The second half of theintegral equation –“in self, culture, and nature” – represents thethree most important worlds
themselves; that is, the three mostfundamental environments, realities, or landscapes through which
the spectrum of consciousness
operates.
“Self” simply refers to my own
interior world or subjective realities, which can be accessed byintrospection, meditation, andself-reflection. “Culture” refers to
the world of shared values, mutual understanding, and common
meanings that you and I might
exchange, such as a common language, an interest in business, alove of classical music, or any
shared meaning or value. This is
not subjective but intersubjective,a world accessed by interpretation and mutual understanding.
And “nature” refers to the exterior world of objective facts, environments, and events, including
exterior human nature with its
products and artifacts. Because
the human organism is a part ofnature, then the products ofhuman organisms, such as automobiles, are products of natureand can be approached with natural sciences such as systems theory
and complexity theory.
These three major landscapes– self, culture, and world – areoften called the Beautiful, theGood, and the True. Or Art,
Morals, and Science. Or simply I,
We, and It. They are also sometimes called “the Big Three,” sofundamental and important arethese three worlds in which humanbeings are always operating.
Conscious living – and certainly
conscious business – would therefore necessarily take these three
worlds into account when planning any activity, because, again,

Book Excerpt ■ Kofman 53

these worlds exist in any event,and you will either take them into
conscious account or they will
subconsciously sabotage your every
move.

Integral Business
Conscious business – business thatis conscious of inner and outerworlds – would therefore be business that takes into account body,mind, and spirit in self, culture,and nature. Put differently, conscious business would be mindfulof the way that the spectrum of
consciousness operates in the Big
Three worlds of self, culture, andnature. This means very specifically that integral business leadership would use the tools that havebeen developed to best navigate
and master self, culture, andworld.
It’s not surprising, then, thatbusiness management theories
break down into three large categories covering the Big Threelandscapes: approaches that focus
on individual motivation; thosethat emphasize corporate culture
and values; and those that focus
on exterior objective systems,
flow patterns, and quality control. The whole point is that integral business leadership would
use the tools of all of them in acoordinated and integrated fashion for maximum results, or else
settle for less than optimal results.
For example, integral businessleadership would use systems theory to understand the dynamic
patterns of the exterior world.
The systems approach to businesshas been made popular by writers

54 Reflections ■ Volume 7, Number 4

such as Peter Senge, Meg Wheatley,
and Michael C. Jackson, among
literally hundreds of others. The
systems approach is also widelyused to track business cycles, asin the groundbreaking work of
Clayton Christensen on disruptive technologies.
But integral business leadership would also use the tools of
the interior spectrum of consciousness in individuals – tools
such as emotional intelligence,
made popular by Daniel Goleman;
Myers-Briggs, already widely used
as a management aid; and personal motivational tools, fromTony Robbins to Franklin Covey.
But integral business leadership would not stop with self andworld. It would also draw on our
extensive knowledge of corporate
culture, shared values, and company motivation. Every company
has a culture, and specific business cycles seem to be most effectively navigated by different typesof corporate cultures, as suggestedby the important research of
Geoffrey Moore, or the empiricalresearch of Jim Collins. Both point
to the overriding importance ofcorporate values and intersubjective factors in long-term success,which any integral leadershipwould take into account if it
wanted to be mindful and awake
in the world of corporate values
and maximum effectiveness.
In other words, all of thosemajor theories of business management and leadership – fromsystems theory to emotional intelligence to corporate-culture management, covering the Big Threelandscapes faced by all humans –have an important place in a true
Integral Model of conscious business. Although this might at firstseem too complicated, the undeniable fact is that any less thanintegral approach is doomed to
failure. In today’s world, nobody
can afford to be less than integral,because the guaranteed costs areotherwise much too high. Body,
mind, and spirit – and self, culture,
nature – are all there, all exerting
an influence, all actively shaping
events, and you either consciously
take them into account in any
human endeavor or stand backand watch the roadkill.

Big Map, Big Mind
I have attempted to give a simple
summary of this overall approachto business in A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for
Business, Politics, Science, andSpirituality. But perhaps the bestplace to begin with an integral
approach to business is with oneself. In the Big Three of self, culture, and world, integral mastery
starts with self. How do body,mind, and spirit operate in me?
How does that necessarily impact
my role in the world of business?
And how can I become more conscious of these already operating
realities in myself and in others?
This is the great value of Fred
Kofman’s Conscious Business: How
to Build Value Through Values.
Integral mastery begins with mastery of self, at an emotional level,a mental-ethical level, and a spiritual level. Anything more thanthat is not needed; anything lessthan that, disastrous.

reflections.solonline.org

Fred Kofman is a living example of what he preaches, a man ofsensitivity, impeccability, and keen
consciousness. It’s not just that
this makes him a better, more
effective, more successful busi-

nessperson, but that it makes him
a more admirable human being,
whom I am proud to call friend. I
highly recommend that you takethe following journey with Fred,learning to transform body, mind,

and spirit as a prelude to transforming self, culture, and world.
And in that integral embrace, neither you nor the world will everbe the same.

A bo u t t h e A u t h o rFred Kofman is co-founder and president of Axialent, a consulting company devoted
to helping organizations succeed through effectiveness, solidarity, and integrity. Fredholds a doctorate in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. From1990 to 1996 he was a senior researcher at MIT, and was named Teacher of theYear at the Sloan School of Management, where he taught management accounting
and control systems. Since 1999, he has collaborated with Ken Wilber at the
Integral Institute’s business and spiritual centers.
fred.kofman@axialent.com

reflections.solonline.org

Book Excerpt ■ Kofman 55

Reflections
The SoL Journal

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