VOLUME 8, NUMBER 3

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change

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

The Language of Powerand the Language of Love
Adam Kahane

Achieving Clarity in a
Constantly Changing
Environment
Adrian Wolfberg andMichael Stumborg

In the Shadow of WindmillsPeter W. Pruyn

EMERGING KNOWLEDGE

The Learning History:
An Investigation into an
Emerging Genre
Stevens Amidon

Commentary
George Rothresearc h update

ELIAS 2.0
C. Otto Scharmer andDayna Cunningham

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

PUBLISHER’S NOTE 8.3

Over the years, the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. haveinspired many. The simple phrase: “I have a dream” has often been quoted as an
elegant example of both personal and collective generativity. Some have notedthat King might just as well have said “I have a complaint,” given the reality ofthe situation he faced. And while he certainly had his moments of doubt anddisappointment, we know him as evoking vision, service, connection and action.
In recent months, a number of SoL members have been quoting his 1967 address
to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In it, he addressed the question,
C. Sherry Immediato“where do we go from here?” He called on all those who would think of themselves as powerless to recognize and claim their ability to make a difference, while not developing atyranny characteristic of the systems they have experienced as so disempowering. As many within SoL seek
to transform organizations into ones that bring out the best in their members while also seeking to tackle
tough issues that can only be addressed together, King’s words ring true: “power without love is reckless
and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.” The truth of this observation is best
observed in practice.
In “The Language of Power and the Language of Love: Solving Tough Problems in Practice” Adam
Kahane builds on his earlier work, Solving Tough Problems (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005) andKing’s observation in the lead feature of this issue of Reflections. Relating five stories of both successful
and challenging projects leads him to ask, “How can we avoid the twin traps of power without love, andlove without power?” One conclusion he draws turns an old saying on its head: you can’t be part ofthe solution if you’re not part of the problem. His examples offer practical insight into a personal stancethat helps create the honesty and insight needed to connect diverse stakeholders sufficiently to work
toward their common interests in situations that might otherwise evoke frustration and antipathy.
Social relationships may be one source of powerlessness, but intellectual confusion is surely another. In
our second feature, Adrian Wolfberg and Dr. Michael Stumborg report on their recent work in “Achieving
Clarity in a Constantly Changing Environment.” George Santayana famously stated, “Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But what happens when our experiences become increasingly irrelevant? What happens when our environment changes so fast that everything we experience isunfamiliar? How can organizations learn lessons from past experiences? Some organizations still findthemselves in the slowly varying environment of the past, but most see the pace of change accelerating so
rapidly that it appears to be essentially constant. Organizational survival requires the methods they use tolearn and impart operational knowledge to change as fast or faster. In this case study, the authors discussa pilot project called Full Spectrum Analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Knowledge Lab as one
method that is already showing significant results.
SoL Consultant member Peter Pruyn has embraced Kahane’s challenge to solve tough problems! He
shares his learnings “In the Shadow of Windmills: Reflections of a Climate Project Volunteer.” After Pruyn
saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s award-winning call to arms on climate change, he applied to the
Climate Project to become a volunteer trainer for the program. He finished the training in December 2006
and began sharing Gore’s presentation soon after. In this article he reflects on a journey that found him
continually reflecting on and challenging his own mental models, assumptions, and beliefs. What heii Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

PUBLISHER’S NOTE continued

learned during the past year – from a new vocabulary, to how to avoid being overwhelmed by the implications of climate change – is that the capacity to learn is critical for generating “progress amidst
complexity,” especially in urgent situations that demand action. Having had the chance to participate in
one of Peter’s sessions, it seems to me that one of the things he is learning is the importance of being
fluent in both the language of power and of love, particularly in the face of issues that stimulate our fightor flight impulses.
This issue’s contribution to the emerging knowledge forum is “The Learning History: An Investigation
into an Emerging Genre” offered by SoL Connections member Steve Amidon. Learning histories are aresearch and reflection tool developed at the Center for Organizational Learning at MIT, SoL’s predecessor, to help organizations learn from their own learning and change efforts. In this article, Professor
Amidon uses contemporary genre theory to examine this relatively new qualitative research methodology.
Citing a dozen different learning histories, several authored by SoL members, he explains the ways inwhich the learning history can help organizational writers and researchers, and how it has evolved to merit
serious consideration in the field. Several learning histories are available through SoL’s website, as well as
the definitive training guide, The Field Manual for a Learning Historian. Founding SoL member and leading learning historian George Roth offers a commentary.
Finally, as a continuation of research updates presented in our last issue, Otto Scharmer and Dayna
Cunningham report on the first cycle of Project ELIAS (Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors) andthe findings they will integrate into the second round. Using the presencing methodology, the processdevelops greater capacity for creating community value for both the participating fellows and their organizations.
We hope that the articles in this issue of Reflections will be valuable springboards for conversation withyour partners for change. We would like to express special gratitude to the authors who contribute to thisjournal for catalyzing and guiding our exchange. As 2007 draws to a close, we wish you a healthy mix ofquiet moments and good company that restore your body, mind, and soul.

With best wishes for reflection that stimulates action,

C. Sherry Immediato
Managing Director, SoL

There are many online references to the work of Martin Luther King, Jr.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr. is one source of quotes
and references to his speeches.

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n Immediato
Publisher’s NoteReadersF E AT U R E 8 . 3

The Language of Powerand the Language of Love:
Solving Tough Problems in Practice
Adam Kahane
Adam Kahane’s first book, Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New
Realities (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005) was excerpted here in Reflections in Vol. 6, No. 6. In
this article, adapted from a speech he delivered at ExpoGestion in Bogota in September, 2007, heshares the lessons he has learned over the last few years about solving tough problems in practice.
Relating stories of both successful and unsuccessful projects has led him to ask, “How can we avoid
the twin traps of power without love, and love without power?” The five principles that begin to answer
that question became clearer through his most recent work with the Sustainable Food Laboratory, aAdam Kahane

global initiative he helped found four years ago. This integral approach offers new hope in learning tosolve our most complex problems peacefully.

For the past 15 years my attention has been focused on one question: How can we work
together to solve our toughest problems peacefully? It is easy for us to try to solve our problems violently – to use our power or authority or money to make things the way we wantthem to be. And it is easy for us to be peaceful and leave things just the way they are. But how can
we create real change in our social systems, not in a way that crushes people, but rather in a way that
lifts them up? How can we together create new realities?
	After 15 years, I think that I can now see the outline of an unexpected answer to thisquestion. In order to solve our toughest problems peacefully, in order to address our mostcomplex social problem situations, we have to learn to be bilingual. We have to learn to speak
fluently two paradoxically different languages: the language of power and the language oflove. By power I mean the drive to act, to achieve purpose, to effect real change in the realworld. And by love I mean the drive to re-connect, with each other and with our world andwhat it needs of us. What I have learned from my experiences is that until we are able to exercise power and love together – to exercise power with love – we will never be able together
to create new realities.
	For the past 15 years I have been facilitating teams of leaders who have come together
from across different sectors, organizations and communities to work on complex social
problems that they all care about, and that none of them can succesfully address alone. I haveworked with teams made up of businesspeople and politicians, generals and guerrillas, civil
servants and trade unionists, community activists and United Nations officials, clergy andartists. With such teams, I have worked on, among other subjects, the transition away fromapartheid in South Africa, the post-war rebuilding in Guatemala, the contested elections in thePhilippines, civic rejuvenation in the United States, judicial reform in Argentina, child malnutrition in India, the health of aboriginal communities in Canada, and global climate change.
I have participated in some very successful efforts and some not very successful efforts.

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Feature n Kahane 	From these hard-won experiences, I have learned some lessons about how to solve toughproblems. I am going to share these lessons by telling you five stories from five continents.
From these stories I will suggest to you five bilingual practices that I think can be useful toyou in addressing your own toughest problems.

Power in South Africa
I got into the work that I am doing now quite unexpectedly. I grew up in Montreal and studied theoretical physics at McGill and then energy economics at Berkeley. In 1988 I moved to
London to take a job as head of global social-political-economic scenarios for Royal Dutch
Shell, the multinational energy company.
	I loved working at Shell because I loved the power. I loved being part of this huge machinethat could deploy ideas and people and money around the world to achieve its purpose. I
loved the company’s practical capacity to create new realities.
One day, after I had been at Shell for three years, we received an unexpected phone call toour offices in London. A group of left-wing activists associated with South Africa’s African
National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s party, wanted to use the Shell scenario methodology
to develop strategies for the transition away from apartheid, and they wanted Shell to sendsomeone to give them methodological advice. This is how, in September 1991, I came totravel from London to Cape Town, and from a life of observation to one of engagement.
	South Africa has a long and painful history of a colonial white minority achieving their
purpose through denying the black majority the right to achieve their purpose. By the end of
the 1980s, it has become clear that the white government could no longer keep this apartheid
system going, but neither could the opposition overthrow the government. So in 1990, thegovernment released Mandela from prison and South Africans began, for the first time, tomeet and talk and negotiate how to change their system: in essence, how to shift who exercised which kind of power to achieve what purpose.
	When I showed up at the Mont Fleur Conference Centre outside of Cape Town, the firstthing I noticed was that the scenario team was not composed as I had expected. The 28
members of the team included not only officials of the African National Congress, but also
members of competing opposition parties, trade unionists, community workers, and academics, and also businessmen and other leaders of the then-white establishment. I was
impressed with this team because they really wanted to use their various sources of power tocreate a new reality in South Africa.
	This team met together four times over the year that followed and arrived at a set of understandings about how to handle the shift of power, especially the shift of economic power.
These understandings ended up playing a role in the success of the transition in South Africa
and especially in the unexpected success of the economic transition.
	There was a joke that people used to tell in South Africa at that time, that faced with our
extraordinarily tough problems, we have two options: a practical option and a miraculous
option. The practical option is that we get out of our chairs and down on our knees and pray
for a band of angels to solve this problem for us. The miraculous option is that we stay in ourchairs, talk with one another, and solve this problem ourselves. In the event, South Africans
chose and succeeded in implementing the miraculous option.
	When I reflected on what I had seen at Mont Fleur, I realized that this project had not
simply contributed to South Africa’s miraculous transition, but had exemplified it. What I
had seen at Mont Fleur is that it is possible for people who had been using their power to Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

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achieve their separate purposes – in opposition, even in violent opposition to one another – tocome together to use their collective power to achieve a collective purpose. South Africans
succeeded in bringing together those people who needed to come together, in order to solve
their tough problem peacefully. As one of the members of the Mont Fleur team said: “Weoutlined the way forward for those of us who were committed to finding a way forward.”
They succeeded in effecting concrete, practical change in their social system in a way that,rather than crushing people, lifted them up.
	I was bowled over by what I had witnessed in South Africa. I fell in love with this way ofworking on tough problems, which I hadn’t even known existed before. I fell in love with thatbeautiful country at its moment of liberation. And I fell in love with the woman who was thecoordinator of the Mont Fleur project. By the end of the project, I had resigned from Shell,emigrated from London to Cape Town, and married the project coordinator.

Power Without Love in Canada
In 1993 I moved to South Africa and with Joseph Jaworski and Bill O’Brien started the international global consulting firm that has grown into, along with other entities, Generon Reos
LLC. We started to develop this “Mont Fleur” approach of bringing together key leaders of
all of the parts of a system to use their heads, hearts, and hands to change that system. We
worked on this in Africa, Europe, and Asia, and in North, Central and South America. It waschallenging, exciting, pioneering work. The approach often worked very well. But sometimes
it didn’t work well at all.
My second story is of a time that this approach of employing collective power to achievecollective purpose didn’t work well. And it took place in Canada, my native country.
	When I started working in different parts of the world after Mont Fleur, I always carried
with me the confidence that I came from a country that had been successful in solving its

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Feature n Kahane own tough problems. So I experienced an existential shock when I found myself in a meeting in Ottawa, where people were talking about the situation of Canada’s aboriginal ornative people. I hadn’t grasped just how appalling this situation is, with rates of poverty,
illness, and violence many times the national average: Third World conditions in a FirstWorld country.
  System thinker Louis van der Merwe taught me that “a system is perfectly designed to
produce the results it is now producing.” So the Canadian system, of which I was part, isin a sense “perfectly designed” to produce these terrible results. One fundamental aspect of
this system is the mental model that aboriginal people are viewed as irresponsible savages.
This thinking was institutionalized in, among other practices, a residential schooling systemthat took children away from their parents to be educated by the church or the state. The
founder of the residential school system characterized his approach as “kill the Indian andsave the man.” The last residential school in Canada was closed only in 1998 – and so thispower relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians has been replicated forgeneration after generation.
	After this meeting in Ottawa, I began working with a small team of government andaboriginal and other leaders to organize a process for unsticking this stuck situation. After
four years of on-and-off efforts, we had hardly made any progress. What I noticed over thesefour years is that even within our little group, we managed to recreate the same stuck dance
that we were trying to change. The government leaders wanted to remain in control and to
fix the aboriginal problem. The aboriginal leaders didn’t want to be controlled or fixed byanyone. And my colleagues and I from benevolent foundations, NGOs, and consultancies“just wanted to help.” We all had our own different roles and models and purposes that neverreally moved and never really met.
	So unlike the experience of the group in South Africa, we Canadians were in this instancenot successful in solving our tough problem. We were not successful in exercising our collective power to achieve a collective purpose. On the contrary, we each used our own power topromote and defend our own purposes and to oppose and block the purposes of others.
	I once heard Rabbi Moshe Waldocks of Boston give a sermon about the biblical story ofNoah and the great flood. In the Jewish calendar, the story of Noah is always read one week
after the story of Adam and Eve. Waldocks asked, “What are we to understand from the factthat last week we read that God created the world and this week we read that he destroyed it?
We are to understand that man is made in God’s image and that man also has within himself
both the capacity to create and the capacity to destroy.”
	This is what I saw in Canada. I saw that power has two faces. It has a generative face,
the power to create. And it has a degenerative face, the power to destroy. But what is it that
determines whether our power is generative or degenerative?

Love in Guatemala
During this whole period during which I was becoming fluent in the language of power, I wasstarting to notice in the teams I was working with another, entirely different language also
being spoken. This is the subject of my third story, which took place in Guatemala.
	Guatemala has the dubious distinction of having had the longest-running and most brutal
civil war in the Americas. It lasted from 1960 to 1996: 200,000 people were killed, mostly
at the hands of the state, and 1 million were displaced, out of total population of only 7 million. Someone once told me that the Argentine torture instructors who had been hired by the Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

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Guatemalan army were appalled by what they saw there. The social fabric of Guatemala wascompletely torn apart.
	After the signing of the peace treaty in 1996, a group of Guatemalan leaders who had heardof the Mont Fleur process organized a similar project there. This Visión Guatemala team was
at a higher level and more diverse than the one in South Africa; it included Cabinet Ministers,
former guerillas, businessmen, journalists, young people, and aboriginal leaders – Guatemala
is the country in the Americas with the highest proportion of aboriginal peopole, more than
50%. This team worked together over two years, and contributed to a remarkable streamof changes in the Guatemalan reality, including in the platforms of four of the main political parties, in the implementation of the peace accords, in fiscal agreements, in anti-poverty
strategy, in academic curricula, and in local development policy. Visión Guatemala also madea major contribution to shifting the Guatemala’s way of solving problems – and it’s a country
with serious problems – away from exclusive authoritarianism towards inclusive dialogue.
	I was impressed with way the Visión Guatemala team had succeeded in exercising collective generative power and I wondered what the root was of their accomplishment. Several of
my research partners from MIT and SoL, under the leadership of Katrin Kaeufer, interviewed
members of the team some years after the project had ended, and many of the team answered
this question by pointing to one five-minute incident that had occurred during their very firstmeeting together.
One evening after dinner, the team had gathered to tell stories about their personal experiences of the Guatemalan reality. A man named Ronalth Ochaeta, a human rights worker for
the Catholic Church, told the story of a time he had gone to a Mayan village to witness theexhumation of a mass grave from a massacre. When the earth had been removed, he noticed
a number of small bones, and he asked the forensics team if people had had their bones broken during the massacre. They replied that, no, the grave contained the corpses of pregnant
women, and the small bones were of their fetuses.
	When Ochaeta finished telling his story, the team was completely silent. I had never experienced a silence like this, and I was struck dumb. The silence lasted a long time, perhaps fiveminutes. Then it ended and we continued with our work.
This episode made a deep impact on the group, and many of them said that the strength
the team, which enabled them to do the hard work they went on to do, could be traced tothose five minutes of silence. One of them said to the researchers:“In giving his testimony, Ochaeta was sincere, calm and serene, without a trace of hatein his voice. This gave way to the moment of silence that, I would say, lasted at least
one minute. It was horrible! A very moving experience for all…If you ask any of us, wewould say that this moment was like a large communion.”
Another said:“In the end, and particularly after listening to Ochaeta’s story, I understood and felt in
my heart all that had happened. And there was a feeling that we must struggle to prevent this from happening again.”	What I hear in these words is the language of love. By love I mean the drive to re-unify
that which was once united and that was then separated or torn apart. When this team, in
Catholic Guatemala, said that this was a moment of “communion,” they were using thetechnical meaning: being one body in Christ. And when they spoke of “a feeling that wemust struggle to prevent this from happening again,” they were speaking of a deep knowing

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Feature n Kahane 

of what was going on in the system of which they were a part, and of what they had to doabout it – what they could not not do.
	Towards the end of Visión Guatemala, Elena Diez Pinto, the project’s organizer mentioned
to me that the sacred book of the Mayan Q’iche people, called the Popol Vuh, contains thefollowing text: “We did not put our ideas together. We put our purposes together. And weagreed, and then we decided.” Love is how we know collective purpose. Love makes power
generative.

Love Without Power in India
After Guatemala, my colleagues and I focused our attention on working in this way to create new realities through acting from this place of re-connection and love. Bill O’Brien,
who had been president of Hanover Insurance Company and one of the exemplars in Peter
Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline, taught us that in a corporate context a generative leader
is one who lifts another up, and that love in this context means helping others complete
themselves.2
	This approach often worked very well. But sometimes it didn’t work well at all.
My fourth story is of a time that this approach of focusing on re-connecting didn’t work
well. This was an ambitious project we were involved in in India. India has one of the highest
rates of child malnutrition in the world, higher than in Sub-Saharan Africa: 50% of Indianchildren under five years old are mdoerately or severely malnourished, and 40% of all themalnourished children in the world are in India. When we organized a collective problemsolving process to address this situation, we encountered a loving response – “we cannot not
act to help these children” – from almost everyone we invited to participate. We put together
a team of 40 people from Indian government departments, corporations, and NGOs andcommunity groups, and this team worked together full time for three months. We made anintense effort to connect these leaders from across the system to one another, to leading practitioners in this field, and to communities and children suffering from malnutrition. Throughthis approach we created a set of bold and innovative solutions.
But we made one mistake: we ignored power. This was a system with enormous power
differences and power dynamics and power struggles. The basic structure of our projectcontained what must be one of the biggest power differences in the world: between wewell-nourished middle class professionals on the team, and the malnourished, impoverishedchildren our work was intended to benefit. And then there were the differences, in this statusconscious culture, between government and NGOs, between experts and novices, between
funders and recipients, between bosses and staff, between men and women, and between we
foreign consultants and the Indians. But we made these differences were undiscussable andtherefore unaddressable. One day we were having a big conflict in the team, circling these
difficult issues, when the most senior government official on the team declared: “There is noconflict here!” – and that was it, the issue had officially disappeared. So as a team we wereable to speak the language of love but we were not able to speak the language of power. But
ignoring power doesn’t make it go away; it just sends it underground, where it becomes moredegenerative and destructive.
	At the end of these intense three months of work, we proposed the solutions that wethought were bold and innovative to the board of the project, who were the bosses of theteam members: the representatives of the Indian “powers that be.” They rejected our proposals almost entirely. Our solutions were too different from the usual way things were done and Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

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had too little local ownership, and were therefore too difficult to implement. So the team was
disbanded and much of our work was abandoned.
	This experience in India left me depressed and confused. I had seen the generative face ofpower, the capacity to achieve purpose, and also its other, degenerative face. I had seen thepotent face of love, of re-connection, and also its other, impotent face. And more disturbingly,
I had seen all of these faces – generative, degenerative, potent, impotent – within myself. So
what to do?
In the midst of my discouragement, I came across a speech that had been given by Martin
Luther King Jr., the great American civil rights leader, in 1967, just six months before he wasassassinated. I was stunned to see that in this speech King had articulated precisely the tension that I was wrestling with. He said:“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is thestrength required to bring about social, political, and economic change….And one of
the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been
contrasted as opposites – polar opposites – so that love is identified with the resignationof power, and power with the denial of love. Now we’ve got to get this thing right.
What [we need to realize is] that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love
without power is sentimental and anemic…. It is precisely this collision of immoral
power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.”3
This speech rang precisely true for me because I had seen in Canada how power withoutlove is reckless and abusive and degenerative. I had seen in India how love without power issentimental and anemic and impotent. And I had seen myself be reckless and abusive on oddnumbered days and sentimental and anemic on even-numbered ones. So how can we address
this major crisis of our time? How can we avoid these twin traps of power without love, andlove without power? How can we exercise power with love? How can we in practice solve
our toughest problems peacefully?

Power With Love in Global Food Systems
My fifth and final story summarizes my current answer to these questions. My answer consists of five principles that I think represent part of the code, the DNA, of a promising integral
approach to solving tough problems peacefully. These five principles correspond to the five
movements in Otto Scharmer’s Theory U.4
	This fifth story started four years ago, when Hal Hamilton and some colleagues and I
launched a global initiative that we called the Sustainable Food Laboratory.5 The problem
situation that we set out to work on is the following: our present food system produces lotsof food; the food is inexpensive for rich people but expensive for poor people; much of it is
not healthy for the people who eat it; it doesn’t provide a decent livelihood for most farmers
or farm workers; it’s not good for the soil or the water or the atmosphere…but other thanthat the system works fine! If the food system is perfectly designed to produce these resultsthat it is now producing, the Food Lab asked, how can we change this system to produce
more economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable results?
	We started off our initiative by looking for leaders of different parts of this system who
understood and cared about this situation as a whole. We ended up recruiting leaders fromfood processors, retailers, financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, govern-

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Feature n Kahane ments, and citizen and worker movements. Eventually we had a team of 45 committed,
influential people from Europe, the United States, and Latin America who together made up
a miniature version of the global social system that we were all committed to changing. So
the first principle is: “Convene a Microcosm of the System’s Leadership.” This is a bilingual
principle because in the language of power, this principle tells us to recruit leaders who havereal capacity to change the system. And in the language of love, this principle tells us to
recruit leaders who are committed to the health of the system as a whole.
One consequence of having a team that constitutes a microcosm of the system they aretrying to change is that, if they can talk with one another openly and honestly, then they can
all see the whole system, from multiple perspectives, in all its complexity and contradictions.
Furthermore, the dynamics of the whole system – including the power dynamics – get replicated within the team’s meeting room, where they are available for everyone to see and towork on. The Food Lab team did this, and also got out of the meeting room and into a seriesof “learning journeys” around Brazil, where the whole system – rural and urban, primitiveand modern, sustainable and unsustainable – was visible on the ground. In this way, theybuilt up a shared picture of the food system and how it worked and why it was producing
the results that it was producing. So the second principle is: “Immerse in the Complexity of
the System.” In the language of power, this principle tells us to focus on understanding how
things really work and what it really takes to change them in practice. And in the languageof love, this principle tells us to focus on building connections and relationships across thesystem as a whole.
	Now as a committed, influential, microcosmic team immerses itself more and more deeply
in the reality of the system it is trying to understand and change, they begin to notice theirown role in things being the way that they are. There was a slogan in the 1960s that said
that “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” But, as Bill Torbert
once pointed out to me, actually that slogan misses the most important point about effectingchange, which is that “If you’re not part of the problem, you can’t be part of the solution.” Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

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If we cannot see how what we are doing or not doing is contributing to things being the waythat they are, to the system producing the results it is now producing, then it follows that wehave no basis at all for changing these results – except from outside the system, violently. But
if the leaders of a system can step back, can retreat, from the complexity of the system they
are part of, and reflect on what is going on and their role in it, then they will know what
they have to do. The Food Lab team, after they had been working together for six months,
went on a retreat that included 72 hours alone, in silence, in the desert of Arizona. And when
they came back from the desert, they knew what they had to do – just as the Guatemalans
had known after Ochaeta’s story. So the third principle is: “Retreat to the Source of Insightand Commitment.” In the language of power, this principle tells us to connect with our own
deepest purpose and will. And in the language of love, this principle tells us to connect, notwith what we need of the system, but with what the system needs of us.
	When a team connects to this source of insight and commitment, within and between
and around themselves, they can move mountains. Within only a few hours of coming backfrom the desert, the Food Lab team agreed on a set of six ambitious initiatives for creating
more sustainable mainstream food supply chains, which they have continued to work on
together during the past three years. These initiatives include connecting retailers in Europe
and the United States to small fishermen and farmers in Africa and Latin America; connecting hospitals, schools and other public institutions to local producers of healthy food; andconnecting buyers of food and bio-fuel commodities with sustainably-managed growers. It’s
not that the Food Lab team’s work, having connected to their source of insight and commitment, has since then always been easy or successful. It is just that they have had the courage
and strength to get out into the world and just do it: to try and fail and learn and try again,
over and over. So the fourth principle is: “Try Out Systemic Innovations.” In the languageof power, this principle tells us to learn, not by theorizing or planning or recommending
what other people ought to do, but rather by acting, by doing, by using our hands. And in
the language of love, this principle tells us to undertake this action in partnership with otherstakeholders from across the system.
	This is how to solve tough problems peacefully. This is how to grow practical, profound,sustainable innovation and change. This is how to build better social systems. The Food Lab
team, after these three years of trial and error, is gradually and organically building up an
entirely new body of relationships and alliances and standards for mainstream sustainable
food supply chains that is spreading within their own institutions and also across their suppliers and customers and competitors and allies. A web of ambitious, cutting edge, crossinstitutional initiatives is spreading across Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Food
Lab has become an influential space for learning and for institutionalizing these learnings into
living examples of best practice. So the fifth and final principle is: “Grow Ecosystems of New
Practices.” In the language of power, this principle tells us to keep our eyes on the prize ofcreating new and better realities, not in theory but in practice. And in the language of love,
this principle tells us to keep our eye on the prize of creating these new realities, not violently
but peacefully.

Conclusion
The Food Lab is making progress on its objective of creating living examples of mainstream
sustainable food supply chains and so is itself becoming an important living example of thisreflections.solonline.org

Feature n Kahane way of solving tough problems peacefully. Peter Senge says that the Food Lab is “the largest
systemic change project I have seen.” Through trial and error we are gradually learning how
together to create new realities.
	That said, the approach to solving tough problems that I have outlined here is only about
15 years old and is still very much in its difficult teenage years. We have a long way to go
before we can employ or replicate this approach to effecting change in complex social systems
reliably. It is not easy to solve tough problems peacefully. It is not easy to employ power withlove. The Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson wrote that “Probably the most troublesome
pair of opposites [that we can try] to reconcile is love and power. Our modern world is torn
to shreds by this dichotomy and one finds many more failures than successes in the attempt
to reconcile them.”6
	In this work, there are no easy recipes or sure successes or straight roads. As the philosopher
Immanuel Kant said: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was evermade.”7 But I believe that there is a prize here that is worth the struggle up this steep andwinding road: the prize of a better way to create a better world. This is a struggle to which I
am committed. This is a struggle that I look forward to continuing to engage in together with you.
E n d n o tes

1

2
3
4

5
6
7

See Elena Diez Pinto, “Visión Guatemala, 1998-2000: Building Bridges of Trust.” In
Civic Scenario/Civic Dialogue Workshop, edited by Bettye Pruitt. (New York: United Nations
Development Programme Regional Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean: 2000).
See Bill O’Brien, Character and the Corporation (Cambridge: Society for Organizational
Learning, 2002).
Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential
Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr . (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).
Scharmer’s five movements are Initiating, Sensing, Presencing, Creating, and Evolving.
See Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (Cambridge: Society
for Organizational Learning, 2007).
See www.sustainablefoodlab.org
Robert Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche(New York: HarperCollins, 1993).
Quoted in Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

A b o u t the A u th o rAdam Kahane is a partner in Generon Reos LLC (www.reospartners.com), a Cambridge-based
consulting and capacity building firm that supports innovation in complex social systems. He is
the author of Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking, Listening, and Creating New Realities(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2004) and of a work in progress on which this speech is based.
He lives with his wife and family in Boston and Cape Town.
kahane@reospartners.com
A ut h or ’ s N ote : I would like to acknowledge in the development of these ideas the inspirationand support of Michael Chender, Jim Gimian, Hal Hamilton, Zaid Hassan, Larry Horwitz and Karen
Rowantree, Joseph Jaworski, David and Dorothy Kahane, Myrna Wajsman-Lewis, Surita Sandosham,
Otto Scharmer, and the late Bill O’Brien.

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F E AT U R E 8 . 3

Achieving Clarity in a Constantly
Changing Environment
Adrian Wolfberg and Michael Stumborg
George Santayana famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeatit.” But what happens when our experiences become increasingly irrelevant? What happens when ourenvironment changes so fast that everything we experience is unfamiliar? How can organizations learn
lessons from past experiences? Some organizations still find themselves in the slowly varying environment of the past, but most see the pace of change accelerating so rapidly that it appears to be essentially constant. Organizational survival requires the methods they use to learn and impart operational
knowledge to change as fast or faster. In this case study, Adrian Wolfberg, from the DefenseIntelligence Agency, and Michael Stumborg of Toffler Associates discuss a pilot project (still ongoing)
Adrian Wolfberg

called Full Spectrum Analysis at the DIA’s Knowledge Lab as one method that is already showing
significant results.
“There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar:
it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor.”					

Dr. Michael Stumborg— George SantayanaNowhere is rapid change more evident than in “knowledge competition” organizations
like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Knowledge competition is the struggle tocreate knowledge capital, to steal it from adversaries, and frustrate their ability tocreate and use it. Moving from the Industrial to the Information Age, warfare is such that
information supremacy increasingly trumps physical destruction. We now see military operations designed to gather information, not to take or destroy physical objectives.1 Knowledge
competition is central, and adversary capabilities now make the consequences of losing thiscompetition extremely dire. Adversaries rarely present the same challenge twice, reducing ourability to institutionalize and act on lessons learned. The ongoing “arms race” of improvised
explosive devices is one powerful and painful example.2
While the technical embodiments of our challenges change almost daily, some fundamentals
remain inviolate. Warfare is a form of competition, and a single unifying theoretical constructthoroughly describes all competition, be it a clash between military forces, between rival
corporations, or between sports teams. Each group operates using the Boyd OODA Loop
(Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act),3 performing each step repeatedly as they compete todominate their respective domains. Whoever executes this loop fastest is often victorious.
Organizational learning enters primarily in Orientation so that fast learning of relevant operational knowledge engenders faster OODA Loop execution and victory. Given the OODA Loop’s
cross-disciplinary applicability, the lessons of fast organizational learning in defense intelligence apply to many other organizations engaged in a Boyd-like knowledge competition.

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Feature n Wolfberg, Stumborg 11

If the key to victory is fast orientation, then the question becomes “How do we create anorganization whose members learn and implement operational knowledge (i.e. orient themselves) faster than the members of adversary organizations?” One approach accelerates thepace of established learning methods – a difficult task for large hierarchical organizations.
The established methods require sequential time-consuming steps: leaders identify problems
requiring new skills, identify the required new skills, develop and fund the training program,train the trainers, conduct the training, and convince their skeptical members that these newskills will not become immediately obsolete.

Attributes versus Skills
There is a better way to accelerate the speed of orientation. Instead of teaching skills in thistop down approach, the organization can create a membership that takes the initiative to learn
and implement operational knowledge from the bottom up. This reduces the complexity oforganizational learning, compresses the OODA Loop, achieves competitive advantage, andmore frequent victories. This is the philosophy behind Full Spectrum Analysis (FSA). Insteadof imparting operational knowledge by teaching skills mandated from above, FSA identifies
and imparts the attributes required of members who will proactively seek out new capabilities
as they identify their own needs for them. FSA moves from skills to attributes, from organizational mandate to individual initiative, from reactive to proactive, and most importantly,
from slow to fast.
“The FSA techniques revolutionized how quickly I can synthesize an analysis
process to its essence and standardize it. The next person to do this particular work
will not only learn my position and be productive in a fraction of the time it took me,
but there will be no loss of continuity should I not be here to mentor.”						— FSA Alumnus

In 2003 the DIA determined eighteen workforce attributes in five categories required forsuccessful mission execution in the Information Age environment.4
Several of these attributes, or hybrid combinations of them, also enable fast-learning organizations. First is the ability to be a life-long learner. Since rapid change renders both recently
acquired and long-held knowledge and skills obsolete, the ability to just as quickly jettison
them in favor of new knowledge and skills is prerequisite. To not refresh yourself is to become
irrelevant. Tied to this attribute is the ability to internalize new ways of learning, thinking,and problem solving. It is not just about learning new material: but about learning to learn
it in new ways – continuously.
“FSA changes the way you conceptualize and the way you behave. It prompts
analysts to think about how intelligence problems are defined and the way you solve
them. FSA encourages active information seeking, collaborative interaction, and reflection. It’s dynamic!”						— FSA Alumnus

Another attribute is the ability to proactively seek out new information sources, analyticaltechniques, and enabling technologies. Proactivity is the critical piece. One cannot simply

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Chart title
Cognitive Attributes
Culturally Intuitive

Permeates “hearts and minds” of target; nuanced thinking

Identifies Patterns

Draws connections between nonlinear events and occurrences,considers low probability/high impact events

Global Thinker

Understands global operating environment; sees implications
in diplomatic and economic contexts

Imagining

Formulates highly original concepts and perspectives

Multi-Disciplined

Brings a range of ideas to group discussions

Judgment Attributes
Questions Assumptions

Guards against allowing “group think”

Calculated Risk Taking

Offers (inherently risky) predictive intelligence

Communication Attributes
Interaction Oriented

Communicates “live” with customer; conversational manner

Networked

Seeks experts with diverse knowledge sources, keeps themat the ready.

Real-Time Collaboration

Adapts to new technologies and customer’s desire for speed

Story Telling

Uses narratives to allow understanding of complexity

Scenario Writing

Develops scenarios based on facts and intuition

Presents Context

Provides on-going, additive perspective to customers

Technical Attributes
Technology and Science

Understands something about both disciplines; aware oftechnological and social science issues, impacts, and solutions

Shapes Technology

Identifies, selects, and tailors technology solutions to needs

Role Attributes
Anticipatory, Proactive

Seeks to understand and anticipate client needs

Customer Focused

Works to ensure data is useable for client successOutcome Oriented

Seeks tangible mission outcomeslearn anew when told to learn. Survival in rapidly changing environments requires theinquisitiveness to be aware of new tools, and the individual initiative to go get them. Related
to this attribute is the ability to quickly distill, assimilate and creatively synthesize new andseemingly unconnected information, techniques, and technologies into novel capabilities.
Several attributes address interactions with customers, teammates, adversaries, and yourself.
The ability to continuously understand customer needs comes first. Many things change quickly.
Customer needs may change faster than our ability to meet them – the ultimate metric of
irrelevance. Today’s intelligence issues require diverse teams that rapidly form, execute (on multiple issues in parallel), disband, and move on to the next issue. Thus, the ability to rapidly
acclimate to, and maximize contributions from cognitively diverse teammates becomes paramount. Equally diverse are our knowledge competition adversaries. New and unfamiliar groups
continually challenge us, as do familiar groups employing unfamiliar tactics or possessing
unfamiliar perspectives. This requires the ability to see problems through the eyes of a con-reflections.solonline.org

Feature n Wolfberg, Stumborg 13

stantly shifting adversary. Since everyone approaches analysis through thelens of their own experience, the ability
to rapidly identify, challenge, and discard the personal biases and prejudicesof our teammates, our customers, andourselves is essential.

Full Spectrum Analysis
and the DIA Knowledge
Lab
Noted deficiencies in analytical tradecraft5 point to the need for adopting
different ways of learning, thinking,and problem solving. The DIA
Knowledge Lab is one initiative toaddress this need. With support fromsuccessive agency leaders, and an intellectually risk-free environment where
volunteers and FSA pilot participants
are free to try new approaches, theKnowledge Lab is in some ways similar
to “Skunkworks-like” activities. It issimilar because it recognizes the needto change and innovate, and the general inability of large organizations to
do so effectively, but dissimilar because
its initiatives are not secret. The
Knowledge Lab creates change at the
DIA through the iterative applicationof well-advertised pilots that change
one or more dysfunctional behaviors. Effective Knowledge Lab pilots transition into the DIA
organization, to effect large-scale change.
FSA is one of those pilots.6 It recognizes that competition is the basis of intelligence – competition to obtain the information needed to advance one’s aims while thwarting the adversary’s, and competition to protect and grow critical information. Preparing for its fourth
iteration, FSA broadens the horizons of participants in three areas: the full spectrum of information sources, the full spectrum of technical and analytical tools, and the full spectrum ofcognitive abilities and perspectives. This may seem a simple task, but significant cultural
impediments, born of the need for secrecy within the intelligence community, auger against
easy transition to an environment where intelligence professionals are comfortable reachingout to a wider spectrum of available capabilities, and are encouraged and rewarded for doing
so. Despite the “A” in FSA, it is not only about analysis. It is about new ways of learning,
thinking, and problem solving – attributes required of every DIA employee, thus the inclusionof non-analysts in the FSA pilots.

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“The one-voice thing is very damaging to analysis – and one kind of cubicle,
one kind of chair, one kind of anything… one thing doesn’t fit everyone.”
					— FSA Alumnus

The literature regarding organizational transformation points to the key ingredientsrequired for success, present in both public and private sector organizations.7 FSA addresses
several of these, and when combined with other Knowledge Lab pilots, addresses others.
Transformation occurs at three levels based on the tenure of individuals within the organization: the entry/working level, the middle management level, and the leadership level.
Rarely will top-down transformational efforts succeed. Even when leaders dictate change,
powerful cultural inertia is difficult to overcome. Regular and fairly predictable leadershipchanges at public sector and military organizations exacerbate this problem further.
Entrenched opponents of change just wait out the current leadership and its transformation
initiatives.
Change is easiest at the entry/working level, where “the way we’ve always done it” is not
ingrained. While slow change can occur from a bottom-up approach, urgent transformation
focusing on bottom-up approaches tend to fail since enthusiastic change agents injected at thebottom of the power structure cannot flourish without “top cover” from a long-lived leadership. Max Planck, a founding father of quantum mechanics noted, “An important scientificinnovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents. . .
What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation isfamiliarized with the idea from the beginning.” The difficulty in accelerating change thenbecomes what some have described as the “iron middle”: middle managers who outlast
the leadership, and use established incentive structures to quash change from below before it
takes root.
“There is a willingness to change – and there are so many young people
at the agency, things will change. It is inevitable.”					— FSA Alumnus“The first level supervisor like me doesn’t know what he can do to push theenvelope.”					— Supervisor of an FSA Alumnus

FSA, coupled with an ongoing commitment of successive DIA leaders to the Knowledge
Lab approach, and other Knowledge Lab initiatives, initiates change by seeding the organization with change agents from the bottom and sustained commitment from the leadership to
influence the middle from both ends. A significant part of the FSA approach is the mutually
supportive network created by the interaction of FSA alumni. FSA participants do not “graduate from a course of instruction and go back to work.” They become part of a cadre
expected to interact with, aid, and support, those that come to FSA after them, forming thecore of a guiding coalition schooled in the attributes of FSA, gradually anchoring the new
approach in the organizational culture. Done correctly, alumni become effective recruiters for
successive iterations of the pilot and soften the barriers to implementation with each successachieved by practicing FSA in the work place.

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“The benefit [of networking] comes from the connections you make between otherpeople, you yourself are a conduit, not an endpoint. That is something honorable andinspiring because you are part of a larger whole, working to enrich others.”
					— FSA Alumnus

What is FSA?
To describe FSA is to describe the behavior it produces. By definition, FSA is fungible, making
it difficult to describe its alumni as people with a certain repertoire of skills. They are people
with a certain repertoire of attributes. Each iteration of the FSA pilot seeks to impart theseunchanging attributes, including the attributes of fast organizational learning. The specificinformation sources, analytical techniques, technology tools, and perspectives covered dochange, so that if participants limit their experience strictly to acquiring exposure to these
new capabilities, they find themselves with an almost immediately obsolete skill set. If they
instead learn the attributes – the ability to seek out the new incarnations of these tools on
their own as they evolve, and to share them, then they constantly refresh their skill set,
keeping it up to date and relevant. An unwavering concept from one iteration of the pilot to
the next is that knowledge competition is the key to victory, which requires participants to
identify and assimilate new knowledge and knowledge manipulation tools and techniques
faster than their adversaries.
The FSA pilots employ several feedback loops, and are thus able to adjust on the fly as
new needs emerge and as the demographic composition of each FSA cohort (about twelve
people for each pilot) changes. FSA facilitators constantly check with the participants tounderstand their expectations of the FSA experience, their assimilation of the targeted attributes, and to determine what is working, and what is not. They make real-time adjustments
to address these changing needs and expectations. After pilot completion, facilitators and
FSA participants (now alumni) identify, keep, and improve successful material and discard
less successful material in favor of new approaches.
FSA is a journey, not a destination. It is not a “train the trainer” approach. It is not theimparting of skills mandated from above, but rather an awareness of, and inculcation of,
the attributes required that enable organizational members to continually and proactively
hunt for new capabilities on their own as their work environments shift and new capabilities
and information sources become available. The ultimate goal is large-scale organizational
behavior change, which begins on a small scale and expands informally through the alumni
support networks.
“The more people you know, the better your analysis – networking is key. You can’t
come up with everything yourself, you ask who else to talk to. You come up withsources that you could never come up with yourself.”
					— FSA Alumnus

Recruitment criteria and conventional training prove generally inadequate at impartingthese attributes. FSA selection criteria does screen for the likelihood that participants areamenable to adopting the attributes once exposed to them. Selection interviews look forcourage, a commitment to collaboration, and a willingness to effectively and respectfully
challenge authority. In Five Minds for the Future8 Howard Gardner contends that education

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today focuses on the skills we need today, and not on the cognitive qualities (disciplined,
synthesizing, creating, respectful and ethical) critical to success in tomorrow’s environment ofaccelerating change and information overload. These ways of thinking must be cultivated,
not trained to. He further contends that no one knows how to create an educational system
to do this. A large part of facilitation in the FSA approach cultivates the attributes throughcoaching and mentoring: a practice that does not stop when the pilot concludes, and enlists
the active assistance of the FSA alumni. FSA is a prototype of the cultivating educational
system that Gardner claims is missing.

How is FSA Conducted?
FSA participants meet formally as a group one day weekly for twelve weeks. Interleaved
throughout is a “Capstone Question” – a real-world intelligence question of interest to
the DIA leadership. The need to apply FSA techniques to the Capstone Question, and to present their findings to the DIA leadership, create frequent interaction among participants
beyond regularly scheduled sessions. Most sessions are a half-day led by the facilitators, followed by a half-day working session where the participants lead and address the Capstone
Question.
Each session has a unifying theme that ties back to at least one FSA attribute. The transmitreceive method of imparting the attributes is avoided scrupulously. Starting with learning
objectives for each session that provide participants with insights about their craft or themselves, the facilitators design material using a theory-to-practical-application dyadic approach.
Theory presentation occurs through an interactive exercise, followed by opportunities to put
the theory into practice, often through a role-playing exercise using an historical or contemporary intelligence problem.
For example, one theme is “biased perspectives,” at the individual, team, customer, andorganizational levels. Participants learn that they carry into the analytical process with them,everything that ever happened to them to shape their world-view, and that that can lead toerroneous conclusions if it goes unrecognized. By the end of the activities, participants understand and recognize their own internal biases, and those of their teammates, their customers,
and their adversaries. Furthermore, they are aware of how understanding these biases help
them to win the knowledge competition by dampening their negative effects on their side, andexploiting them in their adversaries.
The day has four major exercises: Implicit Associations, Operation Barbarossa, Winning
the Battle of Algiers, and Operation Anaconda. In Implicit Associations,9 a fill-in-the-blank
exercise drives them to the “wrong” answer by faulty association. They quickly fill in twenty
blanks with historical information. The exercise begins:
The tragic events of ______________ (date) came as a great surprise to theworld, the American public, and to ______________ (political party name)President ______________ (name). . .

The opening phrase drives about 90% of participants to facts associated with the 9/11
attacks on America, but they are equally germane to the December 7, 1941 Pearl Harborattack. After showing the “correct” answers, the facilitator discusses how phrases such as“The tragic events of” created an implicit association in their mind that led to 9/11.

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Participants discover that they must be vigilant against implicit associations and biases inthemselves and everyone they work for, with, or against.
Operation Barbarossa, based on the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1942, provides a first opportunity to witness and address such biases in practice. Many analysts havean inherent bias toward the logical – toward the facts of the case. Joseph Stalin was anything
but logical. Stalin’s personal paranoia and rabid hatred of Winston Churchill shaped his
actions and interpretation of the facts, driving him to trust Adolph Hitler.10
Participants receive an intelligence dossier with all the facts Stalin possessed on the eve of
the invasion. The facilitators use a list of factors shaping Stalin’s worldview and instructparticipants to read the dossier and play the role of junior Soviet intelligence analysts assigned
the unenviable task of convincing Comrade Stalin that the Germans are coming. The analysts
construct and present rock-solid fact-based assessments of the situation. The facilitators, roleplaying Stalin, respond irrationally and dismiss the facts as English deceit, and infer a datewith the firing squad if this line of reasoning persists – just as Stalin did. Analyst and customer(Stalin) talk past each other. Logic does not prevail. Stalin’s bias prevents him from seeing thetruth. This re-enforces the notion that biases exist within the minds of the people who receive
their analysis results, and that they must be prepared to recognize and deal with that. The
exercise concludes with some advice on how to recognize and deal with difficult people.
Following this exercise is a working lunch with a discussion on war fighter perspectives.
One of three similar sessions throughout the pilot, a tactical-level military officer recently
returned from a war zone gives participants his perspective on intelligence needs. Participants
gain a better understanding of this key intelligence customer segment. The other two intelligence customer groups that provide their perspectives on later dates include a Department of
Defense policy maker, and a commercial CEO.
Participants then shift to Winning the Battle of Algiers, another case study, this time
involving the 1950s uprising against the French in Algeria. They gain insight into how cultural baggage and different perspectives influence actions (and reactions) by role-playing the
French military, the Algerian insurgents, and the Algerian populace. After watching the Gillo
Pontecorvo movie The Battle of Algiers (before the session), the French and Insurgent role
players develop action plans that will serve their interests and win the hearts and minds of
the Algerian people. The Algerian people role-players vote on who will have their allegiance(and why) after hearing the planned moves and counter-moves. French and Insurgent role
players trade the advantage of briefing first in successive rounds of the scenario. Participants
discover that even with perfect hindsight (from watching the Pontecorvo docudrama) it is difficult to understand what moves adversaries will make without a clear understanding of theirmotivations and perspectives.
The difficulty ratchets up further during the Operation Anaconda role-playing exercise.
Foreshadowed by the lunchtime discussion, and set in modern day Iraq, participants no longer have perfect hindsight, and there are now more than just two sides in the competition,with the U.S. military, local insurgents, foreign fighters, pro- and anti-American local sheiks,
and individual agents-provocateur who appear to be part of a group, but really have theirown hidden agendas and rivalries with other groups. By now, participants have become keen
to discover the true biases, perspectives, and motivations of the competing actors as they seek
to achieve their strategic objectives.
The day ends, as each session does, with a recap of the learning objectives, a discussion of
how each exercise re-enforced those objectives, and thoughts from the FSA participants on

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how they might apply what they discovered in their work, and on the Capstone Question.
The same theory-to-practical-application dyadic approach achieves the following learning
objectives, designed to impart required attributes:
Fostering team dynamics and trust, and “getting the question right.” Fast work environments
require working on multiple teams at once, and on teams that change composition with every
new problem, making teamwork attributes critical. Dealing with diverse customers with diverse
needs and sometimes-limited understanding of the team’s capabilities makes the ability tocontinuously understand true customer needs another critical attribute.
Developing proactive and inquisitive behavior patterns, building testable hypotheses andchallenging assumptions from within. Intelligence analysis is ultimately about applying all
available and unavailable-but-attainable data to a hypothesis that answers the customer’squestion. Viewing this application through lenses undistorted by biased perspectives andassumptions is critical.
Getting smart fast. A major part of FSA is tapping the full spectrum of available data –often referred to within the intelligence community as all-source analysis. All source analysis
is a necessary, but not sufficient component of FSA. Participants learn how to reach out
beyond the traditional intelligence community information sources, and beyond most of their
comfort zones by employing open-source research (information available to the general public,
as opposed to secret information available only to the intelligence), knowledge networking,and interviewing.
Analysis and synthesis. FSA, it is not a course about intelligence analysis, or exclusively for
analysts. It is a new way of learning, thinking, and problem solving. (Wolfberg, 2006) Analyticalskills are just one part of FSA. The emphasis here is on the attribute of proactively hunting

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out non-traditional and emerging capabilities – in this case analytical tools and techniques –from disparate sources.
Making and breaking hypotheses. A critical shortcoming of analytical tradecraft is the
proclivity to cling to a hypothesis, once formed, sometimes in spite of emerging evidence that
refutes it. (National, 2004) Because of the critical importance of this skill, not only are
the methodologies of hypothesis testing covered, but also the personal attributes of someone
willing to revisit and challenge their own cherished hypotheses.
The “Logic of the Model.” What are those few key and relatively “static” dynamics thatdrive decision makers? Participants learn how to get inside the head of their adversaries, andeven their customers. Participants revisit Joseph Stalin and try to discern his logic of themodel and how they failed to sway him before because they could not discern the dynamics
that drove his decision-making process.
Delivering analytical results by compelling storytelling. Attempting to drive intelligence
analysis away from a dry and uninspiring regurgitation of collected facts, the “so what”
module ties analytical results back to getting the question right. Participants learn how todevelop analysis products their customers truly want and need, with the capability of creating
actionable recommendations. The “storytelling” module emphasizes this millennia-old formof human interaction and how to harness its power to deliver memorable analysis results.
Being a proactive hunter instead of a reactive gatherer of technology tools. Participants
visit a technology developer charged with adopting and adapting analytical tools from outside the intelligence community for use on the inside. Titled “Out of Left Field,” this session
drives home the attribute of maintaining a wide aperture for new technology tools, similar to
the attribute that drives them to seek information from all sources.
“I think we need to focus more on liberating the analysts. Letting them do analysis.
I think sometimes we are too prescriptive on what we require from them. It doesn’tallow them to be challenged well, and that can hurt morale and turnover.”					— Supervisor of FSA Alumnus“The best supervisors really set guidelines and expectations up front and then letme go. Give me free reign. Then you don’t bump into obstacles. Freedom withinbounds is liberating and you can get more creativity with it.”					

— FSA Alumnus

Conclusion – Where Do We Go From Here?
One lesson common to transformation and innovation is the difficulty of re-integrating
people with new operational skills back into an organization that is not yet accepting of thesenew, and often disruptive, techniques. It is pointless to impart new operational knowledge tojunior employees and expect them to collectively push on the sluggish rudder of the organization, hoping to change its direction without experiencing resistance. Two complementary
initiatives under development create for FSA alumni an environment where they can flourish
and succeed.
Full Spectrum Leadership (FSL) addresses the “iron middle.” Instead of just pressuring the
middle management level with leadership directives from above, and enthusiastic FSA alumni

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from below, FSL shapes the middle managers by educating them on the advantages of FSA to
the organization. It shows how managers can best employ and utilize the FSA alumni toachieve personal success and contribute to organizational success. This process begins even
before the participants “return home,” when FSA facilitators visit each participant’s supervisor
to explain and support the new approaches.
Full Spectrum Remote (FSR) recognizes that the success of FSA depends on a very solid
foundation of FSA alumni to form the mutually supporting change-agent network. DIA isa worldwide organization whose members have a diverse set of roles, responsibilities, andavailabilities. Many in the workforce cannot accommodate a once-weekly twelve-week commitment. FSR is reworking the elements of FSA to deliver it to the unique needs of this diverseand geographically dispersed workforce.
Expansion Beyond the DIA Knowledge Lab – FSA has already grown beyond the DIA, withparticipants coming from several intelligence agencies for each pilot conducted thus far. The
Knowledge Lab leads the charge to introduce new ways of thinking at DIA and spreads theirlessons-learned throughout the intelligence community.

Epilogue
Everyone is an analyst. You do not have to have that word in your job title or description forthat to be true. This is one reason why FSA invites participants from the entire DIA work force,
not just the analyst core. Recent FSA participants include travel office and budget shop personnel. The lessons of FSA are applicable not only beyond DIA into the rest of the intelligencecommunity, but beyond the intelligence community as well into any field where knowledge
competition is the key to success.

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A b o u t the A u th o r s

Adrian Wolfberg is an intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he leads theKnowledge Laboratory to bring solutions from industry and academia to help solve organizationaland behavioral challenges with DIA.
Adrian.wolfberg@dia.mil

Dr. Michael Stumborg is a senior consultant at Toffler Associates, where he assists governmentand commercial clients in their strategic planning and change management efforts.
mstumborg@toffler.com

E n d n o tes

1

Steele, R.D., (2006), “Information Operations: Putting the ‘I’ Back into Dime”, The Strategic
Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA

2Erwin, S. (2006), “Roadside Bombs: An ’Arms Race’ With No End in Sight”, National Defense
Magazine, http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2006/October/DefenseWatch.htm

3

Osinga, F., (2005) Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd, Eburon Academic

4

Barnett, J., (2003) “DIA Workforce of the Future: Creating The Future of the DIA”, http://www.dia.

5

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, (2004), The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of

Publishers, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
mil/thisisdia/DIA_Workforce_of_the_Future.pdf
the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” W.W. Norton & Company
Inc., New York, NY
6

Wolfberg, A. (2006), “Full-Spectrum Analysis: A New Way of Thinking for a New World”, Military
Review, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 35-42.

7

Stumborg, M.F. (2006), “Air Force Space Command 2005 – A Transformation Case Study”, Air andSpace Power Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 79-88.

8Gardner, H. (2006), Five Minds for the Future, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, MA

9	Gladwell, M., (2005), Blink, Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY

10 Murphy, D.E. (2005), What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Operation Barbarossa, Vail-Ballou Press,
United States

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F E AT U R E 8 . 3

In the Shadow of Windmills:

Reflections of a Climate Project Volunteer
Peter W. Pruyn

Not long after SoL research member Peter Pruyn saw An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s award-winningcall to arms on climate change, he applied to the Climate Project to become a volunteer trainer. He
finished the training in December, 2006 and began sharing Gore’s presentation soon after, including one
with SoL members at the SoL Boston offices. In this article he reflects on a journey that found him
continually reflecting on and challenging his own mental models, assumptions, and beliefs. What helearned during the past year – from a new vocabulary, to how to avoid being overwhelmed by the implications of climate change – applies to anyone working in this arena. The capacity to learn is criticalfor generating “progress amidst complexity,” especially in urgent situations that demand action. Pruyn
Peter W. Pruyn

continues to speak to diverse groups about climate change, and to further his own learning.

Walking towards the end of the peninsula, Hull Wind 1 is hard to miss: a 200 foot-talllight gray tower, its three sword-like blades rotating persistently in the on-shore
breeze. Even though I’m still a quarter of a mile away, I can just begin to makeout the woosh woosh of its blades. Visiting Hull at the invitation of a fellow Climate Project
Volunteer, I will be departing this small seaside community just south of Boston on the next
ferry. But before I leave, I feel compelled to pay my respects in person.
Less than a year ago I would have regarded a pilgrimage to a windmill as peculiar. A lot
can happen in a year.
The first time I mentioned to my family that the polar ice caps were shrinking due to carbon
emissions, one relative asked incredulously if I was suggesting that all airliners be grounded.
It was therefore significant when, only a few months later, they raved about a new film they
had just seen, An Inconvenient Truth.
Using the profits from his Oscar-winning film, Al Gore founded a non-profit called The
Climate Project whose purpose was to train 1,000 volunteers to deliver the PowerPoint presentation he delivers in the film. Three months later, still in disbelief that my application had
been accepted, I landed in Nashville, Tennessee along with 200 others from each of the 50
states. I giddily arrived at the training room at 7:30 A.M. on Saturday, only to discover thatmany others had already claimed the front-row-center seats even earlier.
Gore arrived shortly thereafter and spent the entire day with us, going through his presentation twice, once at a normal pace, and once giving detailed explanations of each of his
260-odd slides. Putting aside his compelling ability to communicate complex science to lay
audiences, I was struck most by how much he made me laugh. Taking a few more liberties withepithets as he preached to his choir, he would make under-his-breath asides which I foundhilarious: “Two miles of ice over your head would ruin your day”; “Skeptics are diminishingreflections.solonline.org

Feature n Pruyn 23

faster than glaciers”; “Hikers saw a 5,000 year old man – which you don’t see very often.”
After paying our airfare and hotel to be there, this two-day training program was free. But
in return, each of us pledged to give Mr. Gore’s presentation a minimum of 10 times over the
next year in our local communities, strictly on a volunteer basis. For someone who has kept
an arm’s length from terms such as “activist” and “environmentalist” his entire life, this was
something altogether new.
As a recovering WASP, I was raised to be polite. As an eight year-old, I can vividly remember watching a black Zodiak raft on the evening news, dwarfed by a Goliath super-tanker,
zig-zagging across the tanker’s enormous bow wave in a attempt to stop it. The writing on
the side of the raft said, “Greenpeace.” I distinctly remember thinking to myself, “That’srude.” With this single act of insolence, my mind closed to Greenpeace and its objectives for
decades. Throughout my adult life I saw this same dynamic play out over and over again:
angry activists recruit the half of their audience which already agrees with them at theexpense of thoroughly alienating the other half that does not. This strategy never seemed tomake much sense to me. So what did that make me now?
How about an “environmentalist”? To me, that term means “environmental fundamentalist.” Once again, the words turn me off. I am continually struck by how fundamentalism, of
any kind, only serves to build walls in a world that appears to be in dire need of the opposite.
Am I willing to say that in every choice I or society face, we should choose the environment?
As a trend, perhaps. But words of the early conservationist Theodore Roosevelt come tomind: “In popular government, results worth having can only be achieved by men who combine worthy ideals with practical good sense.”
When Mr. Gore first introduced himself to our volunteer group, he spoke about how hehad been talking about global warming for 30 years. Each year he would say to himself, “Anyminute now, the cavalry will come. Any minute now, from just over that hill....” He waitedfor 30 years. After a dramatic pause, he then announced to all of us that we were the cavalry.
Despite the resulting thundering applause that enveloped me, I didn’t feel much resonancewith that term either.
A name for my new role was still left wanting.
The library of the Runkles Elementary School is beginning to fill. The “little people” chairs
and the “big people” chairs are arranged in a semi-circle around a make-shift screen and LCD
projector. Three months have passed since Nashville. After a number of run-throughs withfriends and family, this will be the third time I have presented to a “real” audience.
Only as the audience begins to show up, however, does it sink in that this audience won’t
just be made up of adults. Easily half the audience is 5th and 6th graders. I wonder: should
I “dumb-down” my talk? Perhaps speak more slowly and deliberately?
As I begin, I explain to the audience that I am no climate scientist, and that while I havelearned something about climate change in preparation for this presentation, it is my hopethat an audience member will know more about some aspect of this complex issue than I do.
But my major learning in preparing for this talk hasn’t been so much the science of global
warming, as the psychology of global warming. This was first brought to my attention by afriend, deeply concerned about the environment, who confessed that she hadn’t seen the film
yet because, as she confided, she wasn’t “ready.” I then share that one person in my own
family is what I would describe as a global warming skeptic, and another who believes it’s
too late to do anything about it – all in one family! Imagine the diversity of perspectives,

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values, and interest we need to makeroom for in any audience if we are tohave a productive conversation onsuch a complex topic.
As I go through my slides, the audience is engaged. I explain that during
the last ice age, fresh melt-water from
North America disrupted the Gulf
Stream current that normally warms
Europe. I ask rhetorically if there are
any other large pieces of land-based ice
in that part of the world that we mightwant to be concerned about. I’m taken
aback by the ten-year-old in the front
row who immediately blurts out theanswer: “Greenland!” There are a lotof adults who don’t get that one. Lateras I discuss the loss of coral reefs, a 7th
grader excitedly points out that if thewarming trend continues, permanent
species loss is predicted into the tens of
thousands. I ask how he knows this,and he explains that he just wrote aterm paper on global warming. I guess
I don’t have to worry about dumbing
anything down.
The kids get it. They’re the ones
who will have to live with the consequences of our generation’s actions. What obstacles are there to others understanding this?
A public library talk by Professor John Sterman of MIT entitled, “Overcoming Public
Complacency About Climate Change” is so full that the librarian has to tell the people standing at the back of the room to leave. They’re not happy about that.
Prof. Sterman is discussing my favorite topic: how people’s ways of thinking can be barriers
to learning. In the case of climate change, one barrier is that human beings are chronicallypoor at understanding the dynamics of exponential growth, whether the growth is dollars ina savings account or the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere.
He observes that many people think about global warming as akin to the Manhattan
Project. In this mental model, climate change is viewed as a problem that is so big that only
the government can solve it by getting a bunch of really smart people together in one room
who will just “figure it out.” Prof. Sterman then offers a different mental model: the civilrights movement. In this paradigm, a grassroots movement started by just a handful of people
spreads through local action, until the government can no longer ignore the issue and passes
legislation to enforce the changes that have been successfully prototyped at the local level.
In other words, global warming is something that was created by millions of individual
actions over a long period of time. The only way to undo what we’ve done is to do the reverse– with the minor qualifier that we don’t have quite as much time to undo it.

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The most efficient energy solutions are those which are adapted to the local environment.
Solutions imposed from a national level will never be as sustainable as those grown locally.
The government is not going to save us; Washington can only learn from how local communities save themselves.
So how do we do that?
On a Saturday morning in Eastport, Maine – the “Easternmost City in the United States”– about 70 residents have chosen to spend the better part of a precious summer day to heara series of presentations on tidal power generation. With a population of just 1600, that’s apretty good turnout. Sitting a stone’s throw from Canada, Eastport is right next to the Bayof Fundy, famous for the most extreme tides in the world. In the last few years, these tidal
currents have attracted attention as a possible source of renewable energy. This morning,
three separate initiatives are being discussed. Arriving late, I miss the first, a dam project. But
the second and third are a little more intriguing.
Two separate projects propose to submerge underwater turbines in the bay. The first isbasically an underwater windmill with short, squat blades not unlike an enlarged outboard-motor propeller. The second device looks like the rotating cylinder of blades on an
old-fashioned hand-pushed lawn mower. Multiple assemblies of these rotating cylinders can bestacked on top of one another to cover a larger and larger cross-section of the tidal current.
Both projects are at the stage of installing a prototype turbine as proof-of-concept to generate electricity. One of the presenters points out that during the testing phase the prototype
turbine will not be hooked up to “the grid” and therefore he is looking for suggestions of
how to use up the electricity that it will produce. The most popular suggestion so far is to use
the electricity to drive a fountain that would shoot straight up out of the channel. In this way,
the height of the stream from the fountain would act as a visual “thermometer” showing how
much power the turbine is producing at any one time. Otherwise, the final turbines would besubmerged and completely hidden from view.
Tidal power. How simple. How elegant. How perfectly suited to the local environment.
Could tidal power become the way that Eastport’s depressed economy can finally shift its
focus away from the 4th of July tourists?
Beyond the innovative technology, though, what I am struck by most at this gathering is thepervasive civility. The audience is attentive. They raise their hands. They ask questions. People
don’t interrupt each other. They wait their turn. The presenters are open about the fact thatthese projects might not succeed, for either technical or bureaucratic reasons. There is real
listening going on, followed by hot dogs and potato salad. From following the national news,
it’s sometimes hard to believe that democracy can actually work like this – let alone, at all.
Now nine months after Nashville, I have given my Inconvenient Truth slide show 13 times
to about 350 people, in total. My audiences have ranged from four people in a huge room at
the local library, to 150 students in a high school auditorium. (The four seemed to pay more
attention than the 150.) If we assume that I am an average volunteer, one can extrapolate
that, collectively, the 1000 Climate Project volunteers have reached 350,000 people in thatsame period, give or take.
So what have I learned?
To begin with, I’ve learned a new vocabulary. “Icequakes” are seismic events that occur
on land-based ice-sheets such as Greenland’s as the ice shifts due to melting. A “localvore” issomeone who only eats locally grown food to reduce the carbon emissions that would normally transport the average food item 1500 miles to reach our supermarkets. “Green-collar”

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jobs are jobs that are part of the growing the environmental sector, such as manufacturing andinstalling solar panels. “Carbon offsets” are donations to renewable energy projects designed
to balance out carbon emissions from another activity, such as the use of your car or flying
on an airliner.
I’ve learned a myriad of details about home appliances that I never would have imagined.
I’ve learned that for the average homeowner, the electricity required to power the clock on
their microwave is more than the amount of electricity used to operate the microwave to heat
food. This is because the clock is on continuously, while most people actually use their microwave for only minutes a day. I’ve learned that the only common appliance that can comeclose to the electricity consumption of a refrigerator is a plasma television. I’ve re-learned
something that my grandparents already knew: it is possible to survive without a clothes
dryer. All that stiff clothing from a clothesline magically becomes soft after just a few minutes
of wear.
I’ve learned that a drip-dry polyester shirt is more environmentally friendly than a cotton
shirt – if you consider the energy required to iron the cotton shirt over its lifetime.
I’ve learned that reducing consumption is partly dependent on developing a new conceptof beauty. At our Climate Project training, we were each given a three-ring binder whose
cover was made of brown corrugated cardboard. My automatic reaction to seeing it was,“Wow, that’s ugly.” But then I took a second look. Obviously, the typical plastic cover had
been left off for environmental reasons exposing the brown cardboard. But I also noticed thatthe metal binder mechanism was attached to the cardboard with screws rather than the
typical rivets. As a result, all the metal could be removed to allow it and the cardboard to berecycled. Understanding this, my second reaction was, “How elegant!” Perhaps our new
esthetic should be related to evaluating an object’s relationship to its future rather thanmerely its appearance.

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I’ve learned about the “climate dividend,” the economic benefits of being more energy
efficient. But this dividend is not merely limited to the monetary benefits of fighting global
warming; there are other more intangible “dividends” as well. One is the renewed potential
to develop a sense of community.
In my opinion, our national democracy is broken. It is broken, in part, by the fact thatmost citizens receive information about our country via a one-way medium: the television.
The result is that when a politician says something nonsensical on the evening news and weyell at the television, he doesn’t hear us. The epitome of democracy is not the act of voting. It
is the creation of a vibrant marketplace of ideas which must precede an effective vote. The average citizen simply no longer has a regular venue for participating in this marketplace anymore.
But perhaps, with an issue which requires local problem-solving to determine the mosteffective local solutions, there is an opportunity to create a local sense of community throughengagement that has not happened in a long time. It might start through activities as innocuous as ride-sharing, community gardening, or making friends at a block party. I can attest to
having met some pretty amazing people in the last nine months: climate authors Ross Gelbspanand Bill McKibben, two former gubernatorial candidates, as well as my other fellow Climate
Project volunteers and Mr. Gore.
I’ve learned the value of “productive struggling.” One of the most common criticisms of
An Inconvenient Truth was that it did not spend enough time talking about what people
should actually do. I disagree that this was a fault. The solutions that people will have themost ownership of are the ones that they figure out for themselves, that are connected to theirown communities and way of life. As such, the film served as a giant conversation-starter tomotivate local answers. In my neighborhood, there are an amazing three independent community organizations that go about these conversations and activities in a variety of ways.
The truth is that no one has all the answers as to how we should “solve” global warming.
All we know is that ultimately, we must consume less. How we all go about that is a deeply
personal question which each of us must grapple with in our own way. Oh, and by the way,
the sobering timeframe of this grappling is nothing less than the rest of our lives. There is no
silver bullet. What we need to find is silver buckshot.

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The first step is awareness. After that, you do what you can.
And I’ve learned that, when facing a problem the size of a planet, doing what you can isthe only way to keep your sanity. It is downright oppressive to live with the awareness that
virtually every act of consumption is damaging my niece’s planet. Prof. Ron Heifitz of Harvard
has suggested that the measure of success on complex issues should be progress. With apologies to Eleanor Roosevelt, better to smile at one Prius than to curse the SUV. (“Better to light
one candle than to curse the darkness.”)
Finally, having passed on “activist,” “environmentalist,” and “cavalry,” I think I’ve finallyfound a name for my role that I can live with. I propose that the fundamental capacity which
can generate progress amidst complexity is the capacity to learn. That’s really all scientists
are: professional “learners,” desperately trying to learn about our ecosystem as it changes
before our eyes. That’s all a community is doing when they engage in productive struggling
with sustainability. They’re trying to be good “learners.” No doubt the noun form of thisword will sound corny to some, but so far I have been unable to find another word that ismore apt.
We create the world around us through our own actions. If we go about our lives in anger,
one morning we will wake up convinced that the world is inherently defensive and belligerent. Conversely, if we start a conversation by doing more listening than talking, we
increase the probability that at some point the other person just might ask, “So, what do you
think?” No, I am not so naive to think that if I help an old lady across the street in Boston,
Osama bin Ladin will suddenly wake up in Pakistan and turn himself in. All I am saying isthat investing in understanding someone else increases the probability that they will invest inunderstanding you. I know of no better way to encourage learning.
The sun is slowly getting low enough for an LCD projector to be visible here in Vellucci Plazain Cambridge. I’ve wanted to do my presentation outside in a park at night for a while now,
and, in spite of a killer head cold, the clear skies beckon that tonight’s the night. The efforts
of volunteers distributing flyers around the neighborhood is unlikely to peak again. Somethingalso tells me that this may be my last presentation for a while.
My experimenting with various projection screens has finally hit on a combination that I
think will work: a bed sheet draped over two home movie screens standing side-by-side.
Meanwhile, three benches away, a homeless person appears to be sleeping off what used to
be in the bottle next to him. As I strategically apply masking and duct tape to the sheet, I heara thud behind me, followed by a groan. I look up and see that the homeless person has fallenout of bed onto the concrete sidewalk.
“Are you O.K.?” I ask. I interpret the lethargic hand gesture I receive in response as a“yes” and continue my taping.
About 20 people come for the entire 90 minute presentation. I would say the audience ismore diverse than many of my other slide shows: two elderly Portuguese couples who have
lived in the neighborhood for 40 years; random college students; an Italian student named
Giuseppe; a few African Americans. Meanwhile, about 10-15 people walking by just stop andlisten for anywhere from five to 45 minutes. Even the homeless person sits up and appears to
be listening for some period of time before mumbling something about democracy and lying
back down on his bench. It will take me several weeks to realize that he has the lowest carbon
footprint of anyone in the audience. What can I learn from that?
The slides are punctuated by ambulances heading to and from the hospital up the street

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Feature n Pruyn 29

and the occasional fire engine from the fire house across the way. But all in all, it goes well.
I am able to encourage a few small-group discussions, including Giuseppe sharing the anecdote that his family in Italy just lost 90% of their olive crop in an unprecedented heat
wave.
Finally standing at the base of Hull Wind 1, I have completed my pilgrimage. The base of thewindmill tower is huge, as big-around as a barn silo, bolted to a concrete slab with hundredsof hefty bolts in a neat circle. I arch my neck, look skyward, and squint. As its 75-foot longgray blades slice through the air above, I time their rotation: “One thousand one, one thousand two....” With one of the three blades passing by every second, the windmill is turningat about 20 RPM in what I would guess is a 10 knot wind. Hull 1 can generate a maximum
capacity of 660 kilowatts – but that’s only a third the capacity of Hull Wind 2.
Built on the top of what used to be a landfill, Hull’s second, much larger windmill a few
miles away can produce 1.8 megawatts. Combined, these two windmills currently produce
15% of the total energy needed by this community of 11,000. And when Hull installs thefour new windmills that they are planning to, that will bring their total wind power output
to 115% of the town’s needs – in other words, they’ll have excess power to sell.
I regard the giant composite gray blades of Hull 1 whizzing by above me. I find the woosh
woosh sound as each blade passes curiously mesmerizing. What exactly is making this sound?
The part of the blade that is moving fastest is the tip. The sound it makes as it cuts throughthe air is modified by the Doppler effect: as the blade tip approaches you on the down-stroke,its wind-noise is higher in pitch; as the blade tip passes bottom-center and starts to go backup, it is moving away from you, so the wind-noise pitch drops – just like a passing train. A
second later, the next blade tip repeats the effect. I suspect the blades’ curious mix of size andgrace would have been enough to give even Don Quixote pause.
As I take a seat on the seawall and watch the wake of passing boats crash against therocks, I utilize another product of the windmill: shade. The town of Hull has been able toundertake this initiative, in part, because it owns its own municipal utility company. As aresult, local will has been free to innovate. And by innovating locally to exploit local resources – in this case an on-shore breeze – the resulting solution is eminently sustainable. What else
remains for us to learn from the likes of Hull and Eastport? I wonder if some day monuments
as large as Washington’s obelisk will not only just stand there but actually produce something.
Sitting in the shadow of this windmill overlooking Boston harbor, I realize something else.
In addition to clean energy and a little shade, this highly functional monument is capable ofgenerating a third, potentially even more potent renewable resource: hope.

A b o u t the A u th o rPeter W. Pruyn is a member of the Organizational Development and Training Department
at Tufts University. Prior to Tufts he worked as an astronaut instructor at the NASA Johnson Space
Center in Houston; a professional pilot; and a computer teacher in the Peace Corps. Mr. Pruyn
studied Computer Science, Computer Graphics and Organizational Behavior at Cornell. A memberof SoL since 2004, he lives in Cambridge, MA.
pwp4@cornell.edu

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emerging knowledge forum

The Learning History:

An Investigation into an Emerging Genre
Stevens Amidon
Learning histories are a research and reflection tool developed at the Center for Organizational
Learning at MIT, SoL’s predecessor, to help organizations learn from their own learnng andchange efforts. In this article, Professor Stevens Amidon uses contemporary genre theory
to examine this relatively new qualitiative research methodology. Citing a dozen different
learning histories, several authored by SoL members, he explains the ways in which the learning history can help organizational writers and researchers, and how it has evolved to merit
serious consideration in the field. Several learning histories are available through SoL’s website, as well as the definitive training guide, The Field Manual for a Learning Historian.
Stevens Amidon

The learning history is a new genre emerging in business and organizational communication. Developedin the late 1990s at MIT’s Center for Organizational
Learning, the genre is a kind of analytical research
report, with a difference – instead of presenting theunivocal voice of a researcher or a research team,the learning history attempts to foreground multiple
and sometimes divergent voices in an organization
to present what Van Maanen calls a “jointly-told
tale.”1 The learning history is specifically “designed
to help organizations become better aware of theirown learning and change efforts.”2 The genre is also
noteworthy for its unusual format – side-by-side columns of text, one column representing the words
and stories of the organizational participants, andthe other column typically the analysis of a learning
history team.
My interest in this genre stems from a number offactors. First of all, the emergence of new genres ofwriting in organizations tells us something about
the changing nature of those organizations. Second,
the fact that the learning history, like the ethnography, is both a text and a research method is ofparticular interest to academic researchers. Third, I
have adapted simplified versions of the genre andused them in my classes in advanced organizationalreflections.solonline.org

writing, to introduce my students to the genre, as
well as to the experience of reflective learning.

Genre Study: 				Some Thoughts on Method
Genres are a particularly good example of what Peter
Senge calls mental models3. Inexperienced writers
tend to see genres as a fixed set of rules, which placeboundaries upon their work, in the same way thatthe rules of grammar place boundaries on the styleof their writing. Like the rules of grammar, genre
boundaries are socially constructed and change overtime. Just as few writers use “thee” and “thy” in theirwritten or spoken communication these days, few
writers follow the rules for formatting and writing
business letters found in the secretarial handbooks ofthe 1950s. The technological emergence of the word
processor, with its formatting, font, and design choices,
have produced a letter design we call the “blockformat” – by moving all of its text “flush left” and byusing white space to separate paragraphs, it has acleaner visual look, and is actually easier to type.
Written genres are flexible, dynamic, and deeply
embedded within the institutional cultures that createdthem. As I frequently remind my students, just because

EKF ■ Amidon 31

grammar rules or the rules of genre are socially constructed, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t follow them.
However, as you become more experienced in organizational writing, and more knowledgeable of theneeds of the institutional culture you work in, you willfind that you can begin to question these mental models,and adapt or revise them to aid in institutional change.
In this examination of the learning history, agenre analysis is used to explain the ways in which
the learning history serves the aims of the writer. Unlike
other forms of textual analysis, in genre analysis theresearcher is not particularly interested in the content of the text. Instead I focus on three broad
aspects of the mental model we call a genre: its social
image, its rhetorical dynamics, and its formal features.
Understanding these aspects of the genre will helporganizational writers and researchers better use andadapt learning histories to local needs.
The Research Process. Because the learning history is a relatively new genre, there are few examples.
My search of the literature uncovered 16 examples
in which the writers identified all or part of the text
as a “learning history.”. E-mail conversations withArt Kleiner and George Roth led me to some others,
and there are undoubtedly many more examples
buried in proprietary corporate archives. I reduced
the sample to an even dozen to reduce the amount ofdata coding and to prevent the sample from being
dominated by a few writers.
The next task was to code the data. I broke thetextual data into segments for analysis, choosing
conversational units since learning histories havebeen described as “reflective conversations”5 among
stakeholders in an organization.
The final task, generating coding categories, wasa relatively complex process which I will not describe
in detail here. I will simply say that I use the “groundedtheory” approach recommended by Strauss and Corbin6
to generate coding categories, but also relied upon
my knowledge of genre theory to label those categories, a process grounded theorists refer to as “theoretical sensitivity.”7 This was the source of the threebroad categories of analysis I describe below in thefindings.

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An Analysis of the Learning 		History Genre: Findings
The use of this coding process had a distinct advantage– once the coding and analysis stage was completed,the aims of this study were basically complete. The
only task left was to summarize the most significant
aspects of the findings.

Social Image of the Genre
While we tend to think of genres as groups of texts,
in one sense genres are not texts at all, but rather theideas readers and writers hold about texts. This iswhat I mean when I use the term social image. The
following coding subcategories describe and definethat image.
Generic Exigency. By exigency, I am referring to the
purpose, or reason a text comes into existence. Kleinerand Roth, who coined the term “learning history,”tell us that the genre grew out of an MIT Center for
Organizational Learning practicum conducted in March
1994. The business people and academics who attended
were interested in answering the question: “How doyou take the experience and understanding which apilot team has learned, and make it relevant to therest of the organization.” From that very first meeting, researchers noted two challenges which conventional business research had difficulty addressing:
how to understand what the entire pilot team learned
without the direct experience which each team member underwent; and how to “document projects so that
others could read about, inquire, and build upon”
them. From its inception, the reason for the existenceof the genre was dualistic – it was both a researchmethod, as well as a kind of research text.8
This exigency led to the formation of a pioneer’s
group which met first met in late 1994 brainstorming ideas for doing this kind of research.9 The groupused a major automobile company’s RFP (request for
proposals) to generate ideas. The group then met quarterly from July 1995 through October 1995, conducting retrospective interviews and creating the internalversion of the learning history for the company. Thatlearning history was then re-edited for publicationreflections.solonline.org

by Oxford University Press in 1999 to describe the“Epsilon program” car launch at a pseudonymous
automobile corporation called “AutoCo.”10
Another early corporate learning history emerged
from the same group. According to the president of“Electro Components” (another pseudonymous company) the learning history was intended to “create amore open culture that would support people andimprove processes.”11 The purpose here seems a bit
more general than the first learning history’s focus
on knowledge capture of a specific corporate event.
As the genre moves outside the internal corporate
context, exigencies for the texts begin to become more
complex. One example in the corporate/non-profit
category documents a collaboration between MIT’s
Sloan School of Management, a private consulting
firm, and a large financial services company. Each ofthese three players had different reasons for participating in the project. MIT was interested in validating a research tool developed at the Sloan School,a “‘handbook of organizational processes’ stored ina database” and in documenting the communication
processes involved in cross-functional project management. The consulting firm was interested in learning from the experience so they could become more
efficient at transferring academic knowledge into
“commercializable research” – their primary focus
was in using the learning history to demonstrate thesuccess of their adaptation of the research tool so they
could sell the consulting model to future clients. And
the financial firm was interested in the learning history because they wanted to document the successful
re-engineering of their hiring processes.12
Another learning history in this category also hasa very complex exigency: the set of relationships between
four groups (five if you count the researcher) is explored:
Shell Oil Corporation, its Nigerian Subsidiary, Living
Earth – an international environmental group, andthe Nigerian chapter of the group. According to Shah,
Shell International’s exigency for participating in the
project was to restore the damage to its reputation
caused by “protests and claims of environmental
devastation” in the Niger Delta which was endangering
corporate profits in environmentally conscious European

reflections.solonline.org

Union (EU) countries. Shell Nigeria’s interests weremore local – its operations were threatened by violence
and local protests – and focused on improving “theefficacy of its community work in the Delta” Living
Earth participated because they hoped to move “Shell
towards adopting a participatory approach to development.” Living Earth Nigeria was interested in improving the efficacy of the local environmental education
efforts it was promoting, and ensuring that local
voices were actually heard. As a whole, Living Earthwas concerned that its own reputation could bedamaged since some international and local environmental organizations were “suggesting that Living
Earth was naïve in the assumption that Shell would
genuinely engage with them and warned that theywould be used for ‘greenwash.’” Finally the researcher
had another exigency for doing the work: the learning history was a chapter in his 2001 dissertation
towards his Ph.D. in Management from the Universityof Bath (UK).13
Completion of an academic degree through a thesisor dissertation was also the exigency for two of theresearchers in the non-profit group (Bradbury andPeers), and two in the educational group (Hashman
and Kline), although most of these had exigencies
similar to the corporate learning histories.
One outlier among the learning histories is thatof the Memorial Health Foundation which seems tobe aimed at telling the entire 25-year history of the
non-profit organization, rather than on analyzing a
specific organizational initiative or event.
Short Definitions/Descriptions. A second factor
contributing to the development of the social imageof a genre is the repeated use of short definitions or
description which readers can distill and carry withthem into their own writings. Most first-time readersof a learning history don’t have any idea about whata learning history is, and are confused by its unusualform. In 11 of the 12 texts analyzed, the writers took
it upon themselves to define or describe the genre forthe benefit of the reader. Most of the 12 corporate
texts do this in similar ways. A typical example comesin Househower’s text written for an oil-refining
company. In a section titled “The Learning History

EKF ■ Amidon 33

Approach,” Houshower notes that “the learning
history is designed to spark constructive conversationby presenting first-hand interview and review comments on the same page and in two columns.”14 He
goes on to present a sample page, and uses Van
Maanen’s term to describe the format as a “Jointly
Told Tale.” He then describes the purpose of eachcolumn of text. All but one of the learning histories
take a similar path – only the Memorial HealthFoundation’s learning history contains no genre description at all – its simply labels the text as a learning
history, and leaves the meaning of that label up to
the reader.
Recurrence. Modern genre theory defines genre
through the concept of recurrence. In recurring situations, exigency or purpose becomes not just a set of
conditions which lead to the production of a text,
but rather conditions which exist in a recursive relationship with genre. The writers memory of theprevious situation and the textual response to thatsituation is used by the writer to identify correspondences which suggest a the same sort of text should
be written again.
In an emerging genre, recurrence is not well established. The exigencies we described earlier were very
specific to the context in which the learning history
was conducted. However, some general trends canbe noted. Seven of the twelve learning histories functioned as kind of an “analytical report” responding to
specific organizational initiatives or events. Five ofthe twelve were used as a research method towards
the completion of a dissertation or thesis, although
they also served purposes for the organizations whichwere analyzed.

Rhetorical Dynamics of the Genre.
Besides a social image, generic texts carry within thema history of residing in social and institutional relationships. For example, the executive summary, an
independent genre as well as a component of manyorganizational reports and proposals, emerges out of
the relationship between an executive and othermembers his staff whose need for details may vary.
By rhetorical dynamics, I am referring to the set of

34 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

relationships between the writer, the audience, andthe text.
Dynamism. Rather than a fixed set of conventions,genres are sites or contact zones where forces of stability and change are in conflict. They are inherently
dynamic, constantly (if gradually) changing overtime in response to the needs of individual users. On
the surface the learning histories from the pioneer’s
group at MIT displayed little such dynamism, whichis natural for a group attempting to “brand” a researchmethodology. However the genre morphs as it moves
out of the purely corporate context – in other words,
once we move away from the work of the MIT
group, we begin to see dynamism emerging. Academics,
in particular, have used learning histories as dissertation chapters, or appendixes to the dissertation.
Bradbury, Kline, Hashman, and Peers all make thismove, using the learning history as a research tool
for a larger project. Shah, who reports learning about
the genre when he attended a seminar conducted by
Bradbury in which she discussed her learning history,
advances the genre even more. He notes that “I was
attracted to the method by the notion of collaboratively making sense of collaborative action” butquite consciously notes his own adaptation of thegenre, stating that while “the form of inquiry has
been used in a number of different contexts…thesehave all taken place in one organization at a time.
The learning history that I have practiced has sought
to conduct the second-person inquiry across a network of four organizations in relationship with one
another.”15 Shah was evidently unaware that Kruschwitz
and Roth made similar adaptations to the genre in
their own use of it to analyze the relationships among
three organizations.
Kline and Hashman, the academics who used learning histories to study educational organizations seemto have done little to adapt the genre, other thanmaking it a section of their dissertation or theses,
and stayed close to the rhetorical purposes and form
established at MIT. However the Institute for Transformative Leadership’s (ITL) learning history for theWestern States Association of Schools and Colleges(WASC), a regional accreditation agency, quite con-reflections.solonline.org

sciously adapts the learning history, presenting it asa series of quotations extracted from 300 pages ofinterview transcripts. ITL appears to have made theseadaptations in order to present the learning history
in a form that more closely resembles the traditional
analytical report. While the use of the quotations
could be seen as an attempt to include the voices of
the interview participants, the quotations are pulledfrom context, don’t seem to include much evidenceof dissent among the participants, and seem to be
used primarily as evidence to build to a univocal
conclusion in the form of a series of bulleted “KeyLearnings” in each section. While it certainly represents a powerful example of the dynamic adaptationof a genre, the ITL text is a classic example of an
emerging genre being subsumed by the powerfulconstraints of an established genre.
Situatedness. Genres don’t exist in a vacuum, they
are deeply embedded in the work of the organizations
which created them. This embedding, which genre
theorists call situatedness, is a powerful feature of
the learning history.
As we have noted repeatedly, there is a great similarity in the learning histories managed and co-writtenby the MIT group. Yet even these learning histories
show subtle differences in rhetorical tone as they are
adopted within distinct organizational cultures. The
Autoco learning history is very much a formal research
report, modern in its presentation, and quite consciously attempts to connect with a modern businessculture where “quality is job one.” It foregrounds its
attempts to merge the legacy quality movement with
the new tradition of organizational learning. The
Heartland Refinery learning history looks almost
literary in its design, with chapters that tell the corporate story. Its learning history group was much lessdiverse than Autoco’s, and included just one consultant and two members of the company’s management
team. Despite its inclusion of diverse voices from theorganization in the actual learning history text, thetone of the introductory material and the text as awhole seemed to focus more on tradition and conventional history than does the Ford text. It has an oldfashioned tone. The Electro-Components learningreflections.solonline.org

history has a modern tone like the Autoco text, butseemed more corporate: it emphasized a series ofbulleted outcomes (noticeable results) over the history
itself, and seemed less interested in foregrounding
academic concerns for validity and reliability than
did the Ford text. In a recent e-mail communication
with Kleiner, he told me that “We had some tensions
in the projects we undertook, because the companies
that funded the work never quite figured out how tomake use of it. There was always a problem of mixed
motives in my view.”16 The MIT researchers werefocused on giving the companies a document which
could be used in workshops to further even moreorganizational learning. But the companies wanted
fixed findings of the kind found in more traditional
report genres. Clearly the adaptations to the genrethat occurred in the MIT group occurred due to thetensions of producing a text situated in a corporate
culture.
One other text seemed heavily influenced by its
culture. The tone of the UNDP text seems very distinct
from the corporate learning histories and the othernon-profit learning histories. The United Nations is
a large organization with more than a half-century
of experience producing research reports and otherorganizational texts. In spite of the fact that the text
was edited and organized by the Society for Organizational Learning, it has a “UN feel” to it. Unlike
the other texts, it also seemed to emphasize a focus
on developing long-term, programmatic initiatives,
rather than simply existing as a report on the resultsof a short-term project. This seems natural for an
organization less focused on next year’s profit statement, than on the long term.
Form and Content. While the formal features of
the genre are an aspect of genre I treat in the next
section, it is important to acknowledge the intricate
relationship between the formal features of a genre
and the knowledge it contains. For example, the traditional research analysis of an organizational problem
is written in a single voice which produces a text whichtends to communicate the idea that its analysis ofproblems and suggested solutions are part of a “closed
system” where absolute certainty of analysis is

EKF ■ Amidon 35

possible. The knowledge produced by the kind of
language is, by its very nature, indicative of the hierarchical organizational contexts in which it is produced. Dialogue like that found in the learning
history, on the other hand, tends to subvert theauthoritative nature of the text. The form of thegenre is essential to the production of its content. As
we noted earlier, all but two of the histories used the
dialogic format.
Duality of Structure. While the form of a genre
can regulate its content, and in some cases limit theoptions available to the writer, it is important toremember that such form also has a creative side.
People don’t simply use genres, they invent new ones
and alter existing ones. Textual reproduction is not
simply a mirroring of the structures – sometimes the
structure is altered. The adaptation of the learning
history genre described in the dynamism section
above is indicative of the ways in which writers havechanged the structure of the genre to meet emerging
needs. Yet even an emerging genre has some stability.
The two-column format for the reflective dialogue
retained by ten of the twelve histories is the mostnoteworthy example of that stability.
Community Ownership. A discourse community
is a system, which maintains and is maintained by
texts with stated and unstated conventions as well as
a history. The MIT pioneer’s group was the firstcommunity which “owned” the Learning History,
and the genre emerged as an almost proprietary
research method for consulting work by MIT’s
Center for Organizational Learning and its successor, the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL).
However the genre’s growing use as an academic
research tool is a sign that it is entering the larger
academic community.

Genre Sets and Repertoires
Genre theorists have noted that discourse communities and agents within them rely on a repertoire ofgenres that develops as the community develops.
Furthermore, genres in a repertoire have a tendency
to interact with one another. Looking at curricular
discourse communities for example, in the four

36 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

learning histories we examined which were developed
to fulfill Master’s or Doctoral degree program requirements, there were interesting relationships between
the learning histories and the thesis or dissertation.
Besides the learning history, SOL uses several othergenres which it employs in its consulting work
including EL Maps and After Action Reviews.17 These
genres may be employed separately or together, depending upon the nature of the consulting task.

Formal Features of the Genre
In examining the formal features of the genre, I am
essentially engaging in an Aristotelian process ofclassification, by comparing the learning history toother genres of organizational writing, and contrasting the differences. Many of these differences are stark,but others are subtle. Table (1) lists these features anddisplays which of the learning history texts containthem.
One very noticeable aspect of the development of
the genre which has occurred as control of the genre
has moved away from members of the founders groupand the corporate clients they served has been theincorporation of abstracts, executive summaries, andconclusions. As this genre, with its goals of fostering
dialogue and reflective inquiry, has encountered andbeen folded into other genres (academic dissertations, organizational research reports) with differingrhetorical goals, features of these genres have been
folded into the learning histories. In most cases, thegoals of encouraging dialogue and reflection seem tobe subsumed, or at least marginalized, by the monologic desire of authority to “summarize” or “wrap-up”
the messy data which reflection produces. However,it must be noted that Bradbury and Shah rigorously
attempted to keep the learning history process separate
from the generation of the academic dissertation. In
both cases, they clearly saw the learning history as
both a research method, and a text to be used to spurfurther dialogue and reflection. Other organizations
which created learning histories outside of the foundersgroup either missed this aspect of using the text as avehicle for further inquiry, or didn’t think it was asignificant enough feature of the genre to talk about it.

reflections.solonline.org

The other noticeable shift in formal features of thegenre which has occurred as the genre has moved
into educational and non-profit contexts has been
the abandonment of the distinctive format, where
historical context is provided by a full column introduction, and reflective analysis and dialogue are

divided into separate columns. In the case of Peers,
the reflective analysis is kept separate through theuse of text boxes, and the dialogic nature of the text
seems to be preserved. In the case of the Memorial
Health Foundation, the genre seems to have been
completely subsumed within a monologic narrative.

Table 1: Formal Features of the Learning Histories
Corporate

Corporate/Non-Profit

Educational

Car
Electro Relational Inventing Teaching
VoyagePraxisKnowledge Reflection
Beyond Launch Com.p.s
Full-column
Xnarrative
AnalysisXcolumnDialogue
X
ColumnGenre
X
Description
Methods
Note 8
SectionTimeline
X“Key
Players”
X
SectionExecutive
Summary/No
Abstract
Summary/
Note 13
Conclusions
Other
Features

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

8
9	
10
11
12
13
14

WASC

Schools as
Learning
Orgs

The
NaturalStep

Non-Profit
Comm.
Memorial
Of
HealthPractice

UNDP
Civic
Scenario

X

X

X

X

Note 1

Note 1

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

Note 2

Note 3X

X

No

Note 4

No

X

X

X

X

Note 5Note 6

X

X

No

No

Note 7

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

X

No

No

No

No

No

X

Note 9

X

X

X

X

No

X

Note 10

X

No

No

X

No

No

No

X

X

No

X

X

X

Note 11

X

No

No

No

No

No

X

X

No

Note 12

X

X

X

X

X

X

No

X

X

No

No

X

Note 14

X

X

X

No

No

X

X

Literature
Review,
CodingTables,Threechaptersofadditional
analysis

Sidebars
for theory

Literature
Review

BulletedKey
Learnings
after eachsection

Literature
Review

Literature Sidebars
Looks
Literaturefor
Review,
like a
Review,
appendix standard Appendix “Toolbox
Notes”
includeshistory
withtheinterview with somelearning
protocols narrative
history
and vitae material
text andandinterview
quotesprotocols

Narrative history, dialogue, and analysis are integrated into standard paragraph structure, rather than as stand-alone sections
Analysis follows the narratives
Narrative history, dialogue, and analysis are integrated into standard paragraph structure, rather than as stand-alone sections
Reflective analysis is in the form of text boxes which follow participant quotations.
Interview data is in italics, numbered as “narratives.”
Narrative history, dialogue, and analysis are integrated into standard paragraph structure, rather than as stand-alone sections
In an interesting departure, comments from participants were included in a “right-hand column” of the overall report. The Learning Histories attheend of the report integrated the dialogue into the full-column narrative. In both cases analysis was not separated from the historical context.
Description of interview Group
Brief sidebar in Appendix
A very brief methodology note in the learning histories indicated where and when interviews were conducted.
Interview list in Appendix“Noticeable Results” Section“Epilogue”“Epilogue”

reflections.solonline.org

EKF ■ Amidon 37

Most of the others in these groups fall somewhere
between these two extremes.

Summary and Conclusions
Examining the emergence of the learning history genre
has given this researcher a better understanding of
how social networks and individual writers influence
the production, revision, and reproduction of genres.
I was particularly struck by the way in which thefounder’s group at MIT played a significant role inestablishing and stabilizing the genre, while also
encouraging or supporting writers outside of thegroup who used the genre for new purposes.
The learning histories which followed the following suggested practices seemed to achieve the genre
goals of fostering dialogue and collective inquiry better
than those that did not:1. Carefully separate the historical context, thedialogic conversations, and the analytical writing of the learning history team.
2.	Use participant validation to ensure the learning historians have not distorted the words oractions of participants. While participants andresearchers will always differ on some details,
this dissensus can be a valuable part of thelearning history process.
3.	After the document has been drafted, use it as
an artifact to spur further dialogue and inquiry.
Organizational seminars to discuss the findingsof the learning history can be valuable.
4. Conduct the learning history using a teamdrawn from key constituencies within the organization. Ensure the team includes at least one
experienced learning historian.
The learning history can be a complex methodology
to use, particularly when professional learning historians are hired and hours of interviews must be transcribed and coded. However, graduate students using

38 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

the methodology are finding ways to accomplish thetask using minimal resources. The learning histories
I have conducted within my own classroom, albeit
a simplified form of the genre, use electronic communication such as e-mail and wikis where I ask
participants speak through their own written words
rather than through the oral interview process. And
recently a graduate student of mine conducted a learning history of the writing program at my university using
a combination of face-to-face and e-mail interviews.
As organizations need to find new ways to understand the tacit knowledge used by their constituents,
and to understand why and how projects fail and/or
succeed, the learning history may become a more
frequent genre in organizational research and writing. One piece of evidence regarding its growth as a
research genre is the fact the there will be a chapter onlearning histories in the new edition of Sage’s Handbookof Action Research. At a minimum, the genre should
be considered by researchers who wish to better
understand how organizations communicate.

A BOU T T H E A U T H OR

Dr. Stevens Amidon is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of English and Linguistics at Indiana
University-Purdue University in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Heteaches undergraduate courses in Business Communication, Technical Writing, as well as graduate courses
in Research Methods and Project Management Communications. His research focuses on the intersection ofrhetoric, genre, technology and organizational learning.
He has publications in a number of journals, including
Rhetoric Review, Business Communication Quarterly,
and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.
He has used The Fifth Discipline as a textbook in
Business Communication classes for four years.
amidons@ipfw.edu

reflections.solonline.org

E n d n o tes

11 Wyer, J. & Roth, G. (1997). The Learning Initiative at

1

Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing
ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Electro Components. Cambridge, MA: Society for2

Kleiner, A. & Roth, G. (1996). Field Manual for a

Organizational Learning, p. 21.

Learning Historian: Version 4.0 Cambridge: MIT Center
34

12 Kruschwitz, N. & Roth, G. (1999). Inventing knowledge

for Organizational Learning, p. 2.

in the 21st century: Producing knowledge throughSenge, P. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Prac-

collaboration. Sloan School Working Paper #4064-99.

tice of the Learning Organization. New York: Currency

Cambridge: Center for Coordination Science, Massa-

Doubleday. I have discussed the importance of Senge’s

chusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School ofideas to organizational writing in previous work. See

Management, pp. 19-27.

Amidon, S. (2005). Write the learning organization:

13 Shah, R. (2001). Relational Praxis in Transition towards

A framework for teaching and research. Business

Sustainability: Business-NGO Collaboration and Par-

Communication Quarterly 68, 406-428.

ticipatory Action Research (Doctoral Dissertation, Uni-

Since completing this study, George Roth and Art

versity of Bath, 2001). Retrieved February 23, 2007

Kleiner have directed me to somefromlearning histories I missed in my survey, and there

doc_theses_links/r_shah.html, quotes from sect. 6.

are others which are not publicly available because

14	Houshower, H. (1999). A Voyage Beyond the Horizon

http://www.bath.ac.uk/carpp/publications/companies hold them as proprietary information.

and Back: The Heartland Refinery’s Continuous Improve-5

Kleiner, A. & Roth, G. (1996). Field Manual, p. 15.

ment Story. Cambridge, MA: Society for Organizational

6

Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative

Learning. Retrieved December 15, 2004 from http://

Research: Grounded Theorywww.solonline.org/repositor y/download/9907_

Procedures and Techniques. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

GlobalOilLearningHist.PDF, p.v.

Glaser, B. (1999). Theoretical Sensitivity. Mill Valley,

15 Quotes from Shah, sections 4 and 5.

CA: Sociology Press.

16 Kleiner, personal communication, May 21, 2007.

8

Kleiner, A. & Roth, G. (1996). Field Manual, p. A16.

17 See Darling, M., Meador, D., & Patterson, S. (2003).

9	

Kleiner, A., personal communication, July 27, 2005.

Cultivating a learning economy: After action reviews

10 Roth, G. & Kleiner, A. (2000). Car Launch: The Human

generate ongoing value for DTE Energy. Reflections:Side of Managing Change. New York: Oxford University

The SoL Journal on Knowledge, Learning and Change,

Press.

5(2), 1-9 and Darling, M. & Parry, C. (2007). Growing

7

knowledge together: Using emergent learning and EL
Maps for better results. Reflections: The SoL Journal
on Knowledge, Learning and Change, 8(1), 1-12.

reflections.solonline.org

EKF ■ Amidon 39

A ppe n d i x : T he L ea r n i n g H ist o r ies

Corporate
Houshower, Hans. A Voyage Beyond the Horizon and Back: The Heartland Refinery’s Continuous Improvement Story
Roth, George and Art Kleiner. Car Launch: The Human Side of Managing Change.
Wyer, Joanne and George Roth. The Learning Initiative at Electro Components.
Corporate/Non-Profit
Shah, Rupesh. Relational Praxis In Transition Towards Sustainability: Business-NGO Collaboration and Particapatory
Action Research.
Kruschwitz, Nina and George Roth. Inventing Knowledge in the 21st Century: Producing Knowledge Through Collaboration.
­
Educational Institution­Hashman, Molly Anne.Teaching Reflection as Insight into Consideration for Gifted Education Programming.
Institute for Transformative Leadership. A Learning History of the Intentional Evolution of WASC.
­Kline, Keith. Schools as Learning Organizations: A Learning History of a Changing School.
Non-Profit Organization
Bradbury, Hilary. Learning with The Natural Step: Cooperative Ecological Inquiry through Cases, Theory and Practicefor Sustainable Development.
Memorial Health Foundation. Memorial Health Foundation: Learning History. Peers, Lawrence Palmieri. A Descriptive
Study of a Cross-Organizational Learning Community of Practice.
Pruitt, Bettye H. ed. The UNDP Civic Scenario/Civic Dialogue Workshop: Antigua, Guatemala, November 8-10, 2000.

40 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

reflections.solonline.org

commentary

Commentary
By George RothGeorge RothThe Society for Organizational Learning, and the MIT
Center for Organizational Learning from which it grew,
has always been a pragmatic place. It was foundedon the concept and ideals of furthering individualand collective learning, the research and practicedeveloped to help people and organizations adapt,or learn, in light of changing conditions or circumstances. The methods and approaches developed
for learning are not sacrosanct, but meant to betested and modified. There is an innate interest invariation, trying alternative approaches, and reflecting
upon whether learning and performance improved.
These, after all, are the hallmarks of learning
processes.
It was under these broader values that the “learning
history” approach was developed and, as Professor
Stevens Amidon finds in his investigation of a dozen
learning histories, continues to evolve. The thoughtful and rigorous approach that Stevens applies toa dozen learning history texts using genre theory
provides interesting insights into both the practicesof conducting learning histories and the texts whichthose practices produce. It is, however, difficult
to say what we can learn about organizations andlearning from the variations in learning histories
in general, and the adaptation of the genre fordifferent purposes, in particular.
The development of the learning history was verymuch envisioned as the creation of a new genre,
so Stevens’ analysis of learning histories and theirevolution as a genre is entirely relevant and appropriate. At the time the Center for Organizational
learning sponsored these efforts, MIT colleague
John Van Maanen (1988) had written Tales of theField, a book looking at ethnographic writing, andthe emergence of a new text which integrated an
ethnographer with his subjects, or natives, in “jointly
told tales.” MIT colleagues Wanda Orlikowski and
Joanne Yates (1992) were writing about and developing genre theory in examining the influence of media
in organizational communication. A partner at a
Boston consulting firm had suggested an evocative
idea around “use,” and that the learning history, asa genre, could “conjure up a use” in group learning
through text discussion, analogous to the idea ofreflections.solonline.org

a tabloid newspapers conjuring a use for people
riding on city buses or trains.
We carefully chose how to position ourselves in thedescriptive writing on learning and change. As writers
we were not to be in a position that held greater
authority than the organizational members we worked
with to capture and write about their learning journeys.
As authors we, and others, did take positions on thedescriptive learning history texts by writing commentaries which provided reflection and analysis of
the learning histories. For example, commentaries
were included in Car Launch: Managing the Human
Side of Change by Peter Senge, Rosabeth Moss Kanter,
and George Roth and in Oil Change: Perspectives on
Corporate Transformation by Edgar Schein, Karl Weick,and Charles Handy. The contract with Oxford University Press for a “learning history library” called
for an initial four books, each with three commentaries. The commentaries were not meant to bea definitive analysis, but just another perspectiveon learning and change from people with extensive
experience and known for management theories,
which would encourage readers in their own analysis,
discussion, and creation of new, locally relevant
insights.
Although Stevens’ insights into changes in learning
history genre are thoughtful and well reasoned, readers
should be cautious in drawing conclusions from asmall sample. The dozen learning histories are asample that is drawn from different authors, manyof whom don’t know each other, and therefore had
different purposes, processes, and contexts for theirwork. As an academic research group our intention
was to share what we learned in creating and writing
learning histories, either publishing what we had doneor making it available on SoL or MIT’s web sites. The
shift in organization from MIT, a university research
center, to SoL, a non-profit organization, diminishedthe momentum behind learning histories, particularly
in terms of time and available resources for conducting, writing, and publishing learning histories. The
learning histories that had been started as part of MIT
research projects were often completed as laborsof love by those involved. The production of working
papers, writing of articles, and publishing of booksn Roth 41
Commentary
Feature n Kahane

commentary

became a secondary endeavor to the demands ofthe other positions for the academics, writers, andconsultants who had been part of the pioneer’s
group.
Looking back, I wonder whether differences insponsorship and organizational affiliation mightcause changes in writing style and stance. The effort
to get learning histories out was successful, as
Stevens easily found a dozen learning histories foranalysis. From my vantage point, I’ve had inquiries
that would suggest that well over fifty learning histories have been written for organizations, many ofwhich have been done as part of academic work,
e.g. dissertations or theses. What has often beena challenge is that the methodology is not as well
accepted by student’s advisors. Case studies, oral
histories, or ethnographic accounts require students
to justify to their advisor their method, the text, andtheir findings (which is why students often make thelearning history an appendix). I am, however, unawareof English majors who have used and developed
the genre as part of their academic research. I am
grateful for Professor Amidon’s writings opening up
this new vista, and look forward to reading more in
the future as to what insights and progress thisresearch will bring.
In looking at differences among learning histories,
it would seem that the stated goals of creating atext which represents the experiences of an organization and its people in significant learning andchange experiences would have variations in its
characteristics because those organizations, andthe audiences interested in that learning and change,
would differ. While the learning history pioneer’s grouptried to standardize a process and form to coordinate our efforts and learn from one another, writing
about the practice was never intended to constrain
innovation or alternatives. The term “learning history”
was not an invention of Art Kleiner and I, as wasstated in the article, but rather a term that gained
acceptance after trying numerous alternatives fromthe pioneers’ group (see the acknowledgements in

42 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

the Field Manual for a Learning Historian, available
from SoL, for the list of forty-one people involved).
Perhaps what makes the learning history a compelling genre is that it is mutable, which itself is a consequence of its development not only by management researchers but by including people withjournalism, action research, consulting, history,
anthropology, psychology, sociology and education
backgrounds and training. The community thatcreated learning histories by learning and working
together proposed a learning history process andforms that is intended to vary, and thereby serve
learning purposes into the foreseeable future.

A b o u t the A u th o r

George Roth is a Research Associate at
MIT Sloan School of Management and a SoL
research member.
groth@mit.edu

Refe r e n ces
Kleiner, A. and Roth, G. (1996) Field Manual for a
Learning Historian, Version 4.0 unpublished manuscript, available from Society for Organizational
Learning (www.solonline.org)
Kleiner, A. and Roth, G. (2000), Car Launch: The
Human Side of Managing Change, New York: Oxford
University Press.
Roth, G. & Kleiner, A. (2000). Oil Change: Perspectives on Corporate Transformation New York:
Oxford University Press.
Van Maanen, J. (1988) Tales of the Field: On Writing
Ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yates, J. and Orlikowski, W.J. 1992. “Genres ofOrganizational Communication: A Structurational
Approach to Studying Communication and Media”
Academy of Management Review, 17, 299-326

reflections.solonline.org

F E AT U R E 8 . 3

ELIAS 2.0
C. Otto Scharmer and Dayna Cunningham

ResearchUpdateT

C. Otto Scharmer

he Presencing Institute, the Society for Organizational Learning, the MIT LeadershipCenter, and the MIT Center for Reflective Com-munity Practice are launching thesecond year of their program “Emerging Leaders Innovate Across Sectors” (ELIAS).
ELIAS intends to contribute to the evolution of sustainable global market systems that build
human, social and natural capital as well as financial and industrial capital.
Concrete outcomes of this 12-month leadership journey are:
• Prototypes for cross-sector innovation that address the shared challenges of creating
value for the triple bottom line – the economy, society, and the environment – with theultimate goal of advancing global sustainability.
•	A steadily growing network of leaders in the public, private, and civic sectors that will
enhance and accelerate the benefits to individual members.
•	A growing capacity among participating organizations to develop sustainable solutions
across the three sectors.
•	Useful information and ideas for innovative solutions to individual members’ challenges.
•	An enhanced capacity among leaders to respond to the challenges of globalization andsustainable development by pioneering practical innovations.
ELIAS is a global cross-sector network of high-potential leaders and their institutions
working collectively to generate new ideas, prototypes, and ventures.
Co-founders of ELIAS include, BASF, BP, Nissan, Oxfam Great Britain, the UN Global
Compact, Unilever, the World Bank Institute, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Why ELIAS?
Leaders in institutions around the world face unprecedented economic, social, ecological, andpolitical chal-lenges across local and global levels. These challenges will only multiply in thenext decades; leaders must confront them. In doing so, they can create innovative opportunities by reinventing business models and identities, transforming social change protocols, andworking more collaboratively with governments.
Community Value will become the guiding term as successful com-panies of this century
purposefully connect to communities, NGOs, and governments to co-create more transparent
and generative economic, social, and ecological processes/relationships. The productive result
will be healthy and sound business, social, and environmental relationships.
Future sources of value will stem from leveraging these four areas of innovation. But for thatto happen, leaders and institutions must reach out to other stakeholders to create new patterns that weave together business, government and civil society.
To meet major global challenges, cross-sector engagement demands new skills, networks
and practice fields. ELIAS provides both the stimulating context or practice field and active
methodologies.

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Community Value
Social or ecological innovation

Corporate
Transformation
Brand innovation

Elias 2.0

Approach
Using a methodology called “presencing” to achieve profound innovations,
ELIAS provides participants with a core
set of practical skills:

CustomerValueBusiness innovation•	Immersion in cross-sector peer-shadowing experiences, and “deep-divelearning journeys” in different regions offer a fresh view into anotheraspect of the global economy andLeadership DNA Transformation
Authentic leadership presencesome of its core issues.
•	Deep listening and dialogue tools help
participants operate more powerfully and effectively as part of rapidly changing systems of value creation.
•	Deep reflection practices help participants convert experiential input into improved
leadership practices and more authentic leadership presence.
•	Hands-on prototyping allows participants to create experimental microcosms in order
to explore the future by doing.
• Participants experience inno-vation processes from concept creation to fast-cycle experimentation; teams build, test, refine, and improve prototype ideas through multiple
iterations in various contexts with multiple feedback loops.
• Participants learn how to leverage their institutional and per-sonal networks in order tomove their systems toward more effective ways of operating.
•	Regular interaction among participants and institutional stake-holders helps embed innovation within participating institutions.

How does it work?
Beginning in 2008, ELIAS will operate on four levels:

1. The Global ELIAS Platform
Emerging highest-potential leaders nominated by the CEOs of their institutions to participate ina global innovation program will receive intensive training in core presencing skills, participate in deep dives, and learn to develop and guide prototyping experiences. A proposed curriculum can be obtained on the presencing website.

2. An Evolving Network of Regional ELIAS Platforms
Country-level and regional programs will continue to be organized by ELIAS participants.
Cur-rently, these are being planned for Indonesia, Southern Africa, Europe, and China, with apossible fifth country-level program in Brazil. In each of these places, ELIAS alumni havecommitted to being core leaders and faculty in country-level and regional ELIAS efforts. These
efforts will also create opportunities for high-potential leaders from ELIAS member institutions to join ELIAS programs at any level.
• Indonesia and Southern Africa: Each ELIAS microcosm will take on a key challenge facing
each country (e.g., flooding in Jakarta; social protection for children orphaned by AIDS

44 Reflections ■ Volume 8, Number 3

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in Namibia). It will also bring together young and future leaders from global ELIAS
companies/institutions. Jointly these teams will put their skills and strategic networks into
the service of solving pressing problems in the local community.
• Europe: The Summer School project led by ELIAS alums from BASF, InWEnt, UNICEF,
and WWF is currently experimenting by using cross-institutional ELIAS platforms andyounger leaders to address leadership challenges related to water issues in Africa and China.
• China: The Learning Lab is focused on the critical issue of sustainable mobility, withobvious implications for the country and region, but also the global community.

3. In-House Platform
Participating ELIAS institutions are pursuing innovations that integrate social innovation, business innovation, institutional (or brand) identity transformation, and “leadership DNA”
transformation (con-necting to your authentic Self). This ELIAS effort is undertaken by participants in order to advance core innovation principles in their own fields of practice. The
goal is to harness institutional energy and maintain the push toward transformation in participants’ everyday efforts. This can be accomplished amongst others by taking on board an
innovative project or through short workshops focused on the core principles. While ELIAS
fellows, as faculty members, continue to enhance their learning as they teach presencing practices, the impact of the course is spread to other members of the organization and the capacity of the organization to make effective use of this knowledge and skills, enhanced. For
in-house workshops and projects, ELIAS fellows can draw on the ELIAS alumni network.

4. ELIAS Alumni
The global network of ELIAS fellows continues to build and im-plement prototypes, as wellas to create space for innovation within their institutions, communities, and the world basedon their enhanced capacity for sensing the needs and aspirations of their communities. These
leaders serve as coaches, and co-creators of an evolving inno-vation ecology that serves our
economic, social, and ecological well-being.
For further information, please contact the authors.

A b o u t the A u th o r s

C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and thefounding chair of ELIAS. He also is a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation and Knowledge
Research, Helsinki School of Economics, and the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, a living
lab for creating social technologies that facilitate profound innovation and systems change. Scharmer
holds a Ph.D. from Witten-Herdecke University in Germany. He introduced the theoretical framework
and practice called “presencing” in Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges (SoL, 2007),and in Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (SoL, 2005),
co-authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. For more information see
www.presencing.com.
scharmer@mit.edu

Dayna L. Cunningham is the Director of the MIT Center for Reflective Community.
dayna@mit.edu

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FeatureReflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Volume 8, Number 3

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