VOLUME 6, NUMBER 6/7

Reflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change

FEATURE ARTICLES

Listening to Ordinary People
Alain de Vulpian

Commentary
Arie de Geus

Commentary

Anne Murray Allen

From Fragmentation
to AligningMark Addleson, Scott Brumbagh
and Raj Chawla
EMERGING KNOWLEDGE

The Connected Company
Peter Gumpert

BOOK EXCERPTSolving Tough Problems
Adam Kahane

RECOMMENDED READING

Dee Hock
Leonard R. Sayles andCynthia J. Smith

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

PUBLISHER’S NOTE: VOL. 6, NO. 6/7

IN THIS ISSUE OF REFLECTIONS we continue to explore the premise that the quality of ourwork is a function of our relationships and conversation – at both a local and global level.
Socio-anthropologist and SoL France member Alain de Vulpian focuses his research on the heart of SoL’s
purpose: to explore the interdependent development of people and their institutions. By “Listening to
Ordinary People” – the nature of his work, and the title of his 2004 book – Alain raises the specific question of how we can guide the evolution of our organizations and society to embrace the richness of fullengagement of ordinary people – something we ignore at our peril. This article is based on Alain’s keynote
presentation at SoL’s Global Forum in Vienna in September, where he was joined in a panel conversation
with Arie de Geus and Anne Murray Allen. Arie de Geus offered this implication: business needs and has
not yet experienced its own “French revolution” to bring democracy to the workplace. Both de Geus’ andAllen’s comments are included here.
If we need to develop more capacity for self-organizing and self-governance, what does that look like inour organizations, and how can we help? Mark Addleson, Scott Brumburgh, and Raj Chawla offer “FromFragmentation to Aligning: Organizational Coaching and Ten Conversations for Organizing Knowledge
Work.” In their experience, organizations foster social networks by actively encouraging specific typesof conversations that practically promote aligning much more than any traditional organizational forms– many of which actually discourage collaboration.
The need to build relationships also spans the boundaries of our organizations. Peter Gumpert offers his
notion of “The Connected Company.” A focal point in his article is a practical tool for assessing connectedness within and beyond the company. Reviewing this relative to what’s needed seems a good place formost teams and organizations to start.
This issue’s book excerpt is from Adam Kahane’s Solving Tough Problems: An Open Way of Talking,
Listening and Creating New Realities. As Adam notes: “The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world. When we fall into the trap of telling and not listening, we close ourselves off frombeing changed by the world. We limit ourselves to being able to change the world only by force.” Adam
documents an alternative that can bring forth our best selves and great possibilities.
Finally, we’re delighted that the recent Reflections article on systems thinking at Ford provoked a numberof comments. These immediately follow in our new “Readers Write” column. Your rants, raves and reflections should be directed to reflections@solonline.org for inclusion in future issues.

C. Sherry Immediato
Managing Director, SoL

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FORD’S IMMUNE SYSTEMI APPLAUD JEREMY SELIGMAN AND HIS COLLEAGUES for their efforts to instill system thinking

principles and practices at Ford (“Building a Systems Thinking Culture at Ford Motor Company,”
Reflections 6.4/5). With a senior-level champion, they are well positioned to address cultural changes,
overcome obstacles that derailed previous efforts, and have an impact on business results. Ford has along history of system thinking and organizational learning, dating back well before the concepts werepart of our current management vernacular. In fact, Ford was leading the industry in implementing
and gaining benefits from systems thinking many years ago. A 2002 interview with Vic Leo (formerlyof Ford, in Reflections 4.2) provides a good history of systems thinking, including what leads to quick
fixes rather than fundamental solutions. Understanding the historical response will have some bearing
on what issues these managers need to address so that their efforts have a better probability for successand longevity, and become part of the organization’s culture, rather than an isolated subculture.
Why were the longstanding systems thinking efforts and organizational learning practices at Fordderailed in the mid-1990s? Several factors contributed, and can explain why the innovations that
Seligman is leading today, and describes historically (which Goodman in his commentary also refers),
might again be derailed. Reasons for previous failures are based on the “immune system,” or the instinctive response of organizations to reject anything “foreign” or “new.” I would not argue whether Fordand other large corporations have immune systems, but I would ask what gives this immune system its
potency. It seems that proponents of new ideas often contribute to the strength of that immune system
by how they reify it through their actions.
The immune system is based on “learned” characteristics. For example, in conversations regarding
early systems thinking initiatives, people have told me that when they first came to Ford, they would goin and talk to their bosses about important issues. They soon learned, however, that you do not go in to
the bosses’ office, even if “the door is always open” with open problems. Bosses want solutions, andoften they want you to propose what they have hinted at as their solutions. Conversely, these same
“bosses” tell me that they wonder why their people don’t come to them to talk about problems more
often! They are often painfully unaware of their own over-reactions and the predominance of theiradvocacy for their own views. In the hectic day-to-day, there isn’t great skill in inquiry, or awareness, or
any real desire to address the gaps between what they say they desire and what happens. The net result
is that people have learned not to ask the boss questions.
What is the story that is told with regard to systems thinking? There is what happened to the leadersof the previous efforts – their results were not recognized, they were not offered acceptable future positions, and they left the organization. With the leaders gone, others who practiced systems thinking felt
exposed and without support. Was the leaders’ fate because of their use of systems thinking practices?
That explanation becomes so potent that many people overlook other factors. The results are descriptions of the aftermath such as “monks preserving the arts and sciences through the Dark Ages,” “STsurvivors,” or “failure of ST to take hold.” The language that results from this attribution reinforces thepower of the immune system, making it as real as it is.
Many other factors contributed to derailing these earlier systems thinking efforts. There was an ele-

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ment of bad timing – the Ford 2000 reorganization into a platform structure changed the organization,and reduced program management positions by 20%. The new CEO had his own agenda, which focusedon “the teachable point of view” (see interview with Jack Nassar in the September 1999 issue of Harvard
Business Review) and, importantly, excluded any other improvement program. At that time, if you
talked about any improvement effort contrary to the “teachable point of view” program, you would
quickly find yourself rebuked. These conditions explain why systems thinking people “all went underground” and were not “willing to come out of their caves.”
The current systems thinking efforts address some of these challenges, suggesting the building of “anew capacity for reflective dialogue, deep insight, and shifting entrenched mental models.” These areimportant challenges in changing culture, so that simple and misattributed causes do not reinforce theperceptions of an existing immune system. These efforts need to walk the fine line that connects theperception of improvement programs to executive’s concerns for business results. While changes inthinking and behavior are what lead to better results, they are just the intermediary changes. The purpose of systems thinking, or any other improvement practice, is to more reliably produce results andsustain performance. Otherwise, the criticisms of “learning for the sake of learning’ approach, without
sufficient focus on real-world problems” are appropriate. However, good results might also be insufficient. Ford’s earlier systems thinking projects produced good results. These results ran counter to prejudices held by executives on the program’s performance. Executives did not pay as much attention to theintermediate product development measures that the team focused on, but to the program’s projected
future market and financial outcomes.
Ford’s current resurgence of systems thinking needs to be applied within the context of desired business outcomes. System modeling applied to this earlier program’s market and financial outcomes would
have provided data and opportunities for dialogue between program managers and executives. The program managers needed skills and tools to create the context to engage and address executive’s mental
models. These are skills for managing change up in the organization. Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s commentary on a similar systems thinking and learning initiative (documented in the 1999 book Car Launch)clearly calls for these change management skills. “You want to learn to actually build learning organizations,” she wrote, “and arm people to be better organizational change agents rather than converted
cultists.”
It is easy for proponents of systems thinking to become enamored with elegant techniques, but when
they are applying them in company settings, they and their effort need to not only be connected to business results, but be sure that they are broadly perceived in that way. Managing those perceptions will
require them to engage broader cultural issues that, when addressed, will allow them to make progressand create an organization that will welcome and sustain their efforts.
George RothResearch Associate
Lean Aerospace Initiative and
MIT Sloan School of Management.............................................................................

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JEREMY SELIGMAN RESPONDSGEORGE ROTH WAS DEEPLY ENGAGED WITH FORD’S EARLY EFFORTS to instill Systems Thinking

disciplines into Ford’s organizational culture, and his comments add depth and texture to an understanding of the situation in which we found ourselves as we set out to reinvigorate these practices within
Ford. We were very much aware of the causes and conditions that George details in his letter. We madea conscious decision not to recapitulate that analysis in the article because we felt it would distract fromits purpose, which was not to provide a history of ST in Ford Motor Company. Our primary message
was that the possibility of successful organizational change is always a function of understanding one’s
corporate cultural history, and that ST, as compelling as it may seem to its adherents, will not establish
itself without a strategy that incorporates an analysis and understanding of the resistance behaviors and“immune responses” of the organizational culture.
George suggests that by naming the immune system, we have reified it and granted it powers it might
not otherwise have. I appreciate the warning, and I agree that an understanding that we cannot standoutside the system is critical to any successful change management approach. I also agree fully with
Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s comment; we want positive change and business results, not systems thinkers.
This is precisely the path we are pursuing, quietly helping a broad array of teams to understand theirchallenges, create the environment from which insights can emerge, and design better, more lasting solutions. As to the dangers of reification, it is our observation that the components that make up what wehave called “the immune system” are not self-aware as such, and that powerful metaphors can create
insight and allow for the possibility of innovative design through borrowing and recombination. We will
be careful not to fall into the trap of believing that our models are the world, and we thank George forhis commentary and guidance.
.............................................................................

SUPPORTING THE ENTERPRISE
IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS SINCE I RETIRED FROM FORD after spending 33 years within its exciting grip.

Jeremy Seligman’s article is a gift for all those who have served and for those about to serve the organizational learning community. The author takes us on two journeys, hard and soft: the first focuses on
professionalism, craftsmanship, and results; and the second on inquiry, possibilities and hope. Personally,
I believe both are intertwined, though compartmental thinking convinces us they’re separate.
Clearly, this Ford IT organization has some very sharp organizational learning pros. They demonstrate a keenness for putting into place the foundation blocks for capacity building: curriculum, competence, practice fields, and integrating lessons learned. Reaching out to include University of Michigan
graduate students (MAP) and then employing these students to improve senior IT managers’ use of dialogue and reflection skills is a great move, as is expanding the program internally to Ford personnel(FMAP).

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The granddaddy question here is what impact will systems thinking within IT have on the larger
system...the Ford enterprise? There’s good news and bad. You can impact the larger system from anywhere within the system (good), but (here comes the difficult) you generally solve problems by working
on the larger system of which the problem is a part. The author’s CIO (Marv Adams) is a significant
executive champion, and the ST group is very fortunate to have him. Some execs are content to “livewith” or even “support” ST projects, but freeze the group out when results have broader system-wide
implications. That won’t happen here.
The possibility of embedding the practice of ST in large organizations is tough and speculative. Despite
Jeremy’s “soft” language, it’s about SCALE. Who really knows anything about this territory? Ninety-nine
percent of us are stumped. The author lays out a terrific set of theories and questions. Jeremy and hiscrew have gone beyond the insights of the group before them, and are now confronting the next stage ofdevelopment. This Ford IT team seems very determined to give their company and its people a fighting
chance to survive in this highly interdependent global economy. Encouragement from all of us is warranted. The systems age is here. Those who hold onto the piecemeal view will drag the enterprise down.
Let’s not let it happen.
Vic Leo
Former Program Manager, Ford Motor Company’s Executive Development Center
Former SoL/Ford Liaison Officer.............................................................................

THE FOUR TRUTHS OF CLARITY
JERRY SELIGMAN’S STORY OF HOW PEOPLE AT FORD embraced systems thinking (Reflections 6.4/5)

reminds me of the very old observation that understanding the complexity of our organizations, what
they want to achieve, and how to go about achieving what they want isn’t hard because people don’t havethe tools; it is hard because people haven’t been shown how to use them. What I refer to as ‘the Four
Truths of Clarity’ show that we do have the tools, and that to use them we simply need to overcome thebarriers to using them.
1. Not understanding the system clearly, as it really is, both in what it wants to achieve and in how
it works, leads to very ineffective and inefficient systems. We experience this state of confusion when welack clarity: on a personal level whenever we make an obvious mistake and say to ourselves, “I knew
better than that”; on a group level whenever someone states after a group blunder, “I could have told
you that, if you would have asked”; and on an organizational level whenever we see intelligent, passionate people with years of experience make seemingly stupid decisions.
2. Not understanding the system clearly is caused by barriers to what we experience and by our ability to experience the system. The first barrier is that we are not able to process the infinite number ofdetails available to us at all moments. And, with the inputs we are able to process, we don’t. The second

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barrier exists because we are usually mindless in a distracted state, paying attention to our own thoughts
and not to the system.
3. By understanding what influences these barriers to systems experiencing, we can overcome thesebarriers. The first barrier of cognitive ability can be overcome somewhat by recognizing its existence.
Knowing that we are not capable of knowing everything puts us in the position of asking rather thanassuming. The second barrier of mindful attention can be overcome by increasing our ability to be mindful to what we can process about the system.
4. Since we experience systems through our body, heart, and head, overcoming the barriers requiresthat we build our capacity to experience systems through our body, heart, and head with greater clarity.
Very simple exercises have been found to be useful and motivating in being mindful to information we
receive from our body, heart, and head. It has also been shown that it is quite possible to develop one’s
ability to act in a mindful, clear way continuously.
Jim Ritchie-Dunham
President, Institute for Strategic Clarity.............................................................................

S Y S T E M I C F O R C E S I N H E A LT H C A R E
The power and decision making dynamics described in Manoj Pawar’s article (“Committees and Boards
in Health Care Organizations,” Reflections 6.4/5) are very real and very deeply entrenched in many
health care organizations, particularly those which deliver direct medical services. In my experience, theystem from two systemic forces which set the stage for conflict:
The historical authority of the physician:Direct medical care is a hierarchical, power based on expertise system. Decision making and final
authority rest with the physician.
The emergence of professional health care management:
As hospitals and health care have become more complex and institutionalized, a “professional management class” has arisen.
When these two forces come together, an almost inevitable power struggle ensues between administrators and physicians – doctors being sometimes resentful and dismissive of administrators who they regard
as less knowledgeable people attempting to infringe on physician’s power; managers viewing doctors as
entrenched power brokers who block administrators’ ability to operate effectively.
As the author points out, the traditional health care power and decision making model, while usually
appropriate for medical emergencies, is not effective in complex management situations requiring
thought, deliberation, effective conversations, and sharing of mental models. The crux of the difficulty
for many health care professionals lies in their natural tendency to transfer the traditional decision making model to all situations, and their related lack of capability to engage in other conversational anddecision making modes when working through complex systemic issues.

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Given the long history of the physician-as-expert decision making model, it is highly unlikely that
fundamental transformation in health care decision making will come quickly, and it is at least equallyunlikely that a frontal assault on the current model will achieve anything other than causing people todig in to their respective viewpoints and ways of behaving, thus exacerbating the conflict.
What will work more effectively over time are approaches which acknowledge the closed systemhierarchical model as existing for very good reasons and as effective in many situations, thereby “honoring the monarch” and respecting physicians’ very real knowledge and skills; and offer support inusing other approaches for other kinds of situations, e.g. dialogue and participatory decision making,and tie the benefits of using these approaches to outcomes held dear by all parties – physicians, healthcare managers, board members, and other key players.
Dr. Steven P. Ober
Executive Consultant............................................................................
Send your comments, questions, and suggestions to reflections@solonline.org

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FEATURE

Listening to Ordinary People:
The Process of Civilization on the
Way to a New Society
By Alain de Vulpian

S
Alain de Vulpian

ince the end of the 1940s, a considerable volume of ethnological field research has
been compiled in the democracies of Europe and North America. It focuses onchanges in the ways people interact with the social and economic systems within
which they live their everyday lives. One of the fathers of this line of research is the Americansocial scientist David Riesman.1 Throughout the 50-plus years of my professional life, I haveparticipated in the development of this research. Now freed from managerial responsibility
for my team, I have had time to re-analyze this mountain of data and re-examine the lines offorce of the anthropo-sociological transformation through which we are now living.
I have reached the conclusion that we are in the epicenter of a developmental process ofcivilization that is deeply transforming Western culture and possibly preparing the way for aworldwide civilization. What do I mean by a developmental process of civilization? Norbert
Elias, the great German sociologist, gave body to this concept of a “chain reaction of chain
reactions” that involves power holders, institutions, organizations, communications, ordinary people, manners, customs, the social fabric, emerging technologies, and so on.2 Thisphenomenon transforms a civilization and gives life to a new society. No one has designed,
desired, or piloted this chain reaction of chain reactions. It has occurred spontaneously, iscontinuing, and is now spreading to other regions of the planet.
This process is extremely complex, affecting all levels of our social life, from the extreme“micro” level (for example, the lives of couples and families, or networks of friends) to the“macro” and “mega” levels (for example, the birth of new organizations, companies andstates, or worldwide regulatory bodies). In an extreme simplification, one could say that an
explosion of personal autonomy is feeding into and enriching the social fabric, producing
very high levels of complex interaction through which several technical and technologicalmodes of progress are selected. These selections in turn reinforce the levels of individualautonomy and social complexity. These interdependences are bringing to life a new formof society that selects and is selected by new forms of governance (see Figure 1, page 2). But
we shall see that governance is having difficulty in keeping up with the levels of complexityof today’s socio-technological fabric, resulting in distortions, turbulence, blockages, and lossof vitality.
This developmental process primarily affects ordinary people and the social fabric that is
woven from their multiple interactions. During the past half century, ethnologists studying
modernity have documented how ordinary people, searching for emancipation and personalreflections.solonline.org

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Figure 1: Society and Governance—Mutual Selection and Reinforcement

Ordinary people become
more autonomous and in touchwith inner resources

An extremely complex social
fabric is self-organizing

Scientific and technologicalinnovations synergize with othertransformations

New forms of governancebegin hesitantly to emerge

happiness, undergo a learning process: they progressively deepen their understanding ofthemselves and learn how to live their lives. More directly in contact with their sensations,emotions, impulses, and intuitions, and also better equipped to think for themselves, millions,and tens and hundreds of millions, of individuals are thus becoming independent entities intheir own right, more autonomous and more capable of wisely conducting their own lives.
People in this process of transformation connect and disconnect from each other in theirown ways. From these billions of connections, avoidances, and disconnections are born networks, halos of preference or influence, and interdependent sociosystems – in short, a social
fabric of extreme complexity. The explosion of microtelecommunication after
the mid-1980s was in response to the need for autonomy and connections,Self-organizing
and has multiplied the speed and intensity of these spontaneous emergences
and self-regulating, of life.
This new social fabric has all the complexity of a living organism. Selfthis new socialorganizing and self-regulating, it places participants on equal footing andfabric places
thus, undermines hierarchies. It runs counter to bureaucracies and technocraparticipants oncies and all earlier forms of power and organization that govern from the top
down. Acts of authority by these earlier forms of government are more freequal footing andquently seen as ill-timed and as triggering unwanted effects, so that theirthus, undermines
capacity to wield power begins to crumble.
In families, businesses, schools, associations, and within public authorities,
hierarchies.
the search is on for new ways to influence the unfolding of events. Effective
approaches are proving to be soft rather than hard, and correspond to an extended understanding of fundamental processes, and insights into how to derive advantage from them.
These solutions tend to be therapeutic, strategic, and catalytic,resembling more closely thework of the doctor or the gardener than the efforts of the engineer or the lawyer. They arecharacterized by partnership rather than sovereignty.
The effects of this dynamic on the distribution of power are already strongly felt. The
autonomous and vital individuals who comprise the majority of our populations are quietly

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withdrawing from official society and its increasingly fatigued institutions. By living out theirlives along this more autonomous trajectory, they construct another world.
L’Ami Public, a think-tank focused on the transformation of society, public powers, andbusinesses, currently conducts field research on French people who are clearly affected by this“process of civilization” – a good two-thirds of the population. Many of these people feelthat professional politicians, parties, and even the trade unions don’t see the real problems,
exhaust themselves in artificial conflicts, and seek above all to preserve their own power
structures. This population is more or less explicitly waiting for a change in both society andits politics, but refuses to get involved in the militant political action that is proposed. Manytake refuge in the careful construction of their personal lives, protecting them from aggression
and ambient stress. They frequently feel that the more they create their own fulfilling lives,
the more society as a whole will actualize its potentialities. Others seek more deliberately to
influence things that concern them and to provide solutions for this or that social ill. They
thus participate in the immense movement toward social therapy that seeks to relieve society’s
aches and pains. This phenomenon is evidently not restricted to France. The current swarm
of informal networks, associations, and NGOs is an expression of ordinary people taking
power and compelling previous power-holders to treat them as partners.

Profound Change in Ordinary People
Every year, more people “modernize” themselves. This transformation starts with the struggle
to emancipate oneself from enforced patterns of activity and existence, and from habits, traditions, conventions, and authorities, and then opens out rapidly into a learning process thatenvelops the self and the life it experiences. This double movement makes people increasingly
independent and autonomous, and far more capable than their predecessors of piloting theirown lives in their own ways. This change is profound, affecting not only values and customs,
but the people themselves, their individual economies, and quite probably the organizationand functioning of their brains.

The Movement Toward Emancipation
This movement has distant roots, and has seen a variety of incarnations at different epochs
and in different milieus. Beginning during the Renaissance, through the later Reformation,and most evidently since the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions, people
in the West began specifically to seek personal emancipation and individual happiness. They
affirmed their right to exercise the rationality of their own minds, independent from reigning
dogma.
This combat for personal liberty is a struggle against the constraints imposed by society,but it is also a struggle within the self insofar as societal constraints become internalized.
When one seeks to disencumber oneself from adherence to the past, a new, freer, and more
flexible personality can replace the earlier pattern.
For some, emancipation does not mean merely liberating oneself from earlier social andmoral constraints; it also means escaping from one’s social condition. Beginning in the last
decades of the nineteenth century, this motivation encouraged social change: it fed the collective struggle of the proletarian class, and then more and more clearly encouraged thepersonal engagement of workers in the race for modernity and consumption. During the first
two-thirds of the twentieth century, hundreds of millions of Europeans and North Americans

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Feature ■ de Vulpian 3changed their daily habits so as to rise in the hierarchy of modernity and social standing. In
the 1960s and 1970s, the most extreme version flourished in the United States, where theindividual was convinced of the possession of a unique personality that had at all costs to be
freed from its socially imposed shackles and affirmed in spite of all resistances.3

Sensation and Emotion Rediscovered
As Western culture developed over the last few centuries, it turned its attention away fromsensations and emotions to concentrate on clarity of thought. In the education of its children
it emphasized the visual at the expense of other senses, which were often deprecated as close
to animality and sources of sin. Western culture placed the accent on clarity of representation,on the intellectualized, and on the rational.
But by 1952 in Sweden, and by 1954 in France the first fissures appeared in this once
useful but now repressive edifice. People – in particular young people who felt themselves tobe “modern” – were discovering tactile, olfactory, proprioceptive, and auditory sensations,and were living polysensual experiences with astonishment and pleasure. This polysensualism
has spread more and more widely through Western populations.
As ordinary people awaken to their sensations and their emotions, they make discoveries.
Some of the most frequent and most significant are:• the crucial importance of affection and love
• the illusion of “One Great Love,” or the “Great Revolution,” and the more satisfying accumulation of micro-happinesses, through physical and mental well-being,
which is really what makes for happiness• the desirability of cultivating semi-ecstatic experiences (e.g., communion withnature or the cosmos, or an oceanic feeling of oneness and fulfillment – as natural
phenomena, immanent, or the presence of God)

Navigating Life Wisely
An increasing number of people with secondary educations have chosen to make use of theirobservation and reasoning skills to reflect not on ideas, concepts, books, and ideologies, buton themselves and their own concrete life experiences.
Today most people simply want to shape their own lives in their own ways. They wantlives that include affection, micro-happinesses, and feelings of well-being – the moments offulfillment and the elements of meaning that are vital needs for the majority of people. Earlier
motivations that once took priority, such as duty, the fatherland, religion, the revolution,
career, social standing, or consumption, are absent or relegated to the back of the queue.
In 1984, while we were exploring attitudes among young moderns in the course of theirdevelopment, we first described the way such people guide their lives. We named thisapproach “strategic opportunism,” also known as “adaptive navigation.” Steering of thiskind does not determinedly pursue a previously fixed objective; it makes the most ofopportunities as they occur, and re-evaluates objectives according to the difficulties
encountered. People sense arising opportunities and threats, and try to take advantage of theformer while avoiding or transforming the latter. They feel neither subject to fate nor allpowerful. They cultivate their autonomy but do not consider themselves sovereign individuals,
or actors external to their environment who act on it to transform it. Rather, they see

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themselves as links in an environment by which they are transformed and which theytransform. Progressive exploration of the individual’s “right path” results just as much frompersonal impulse as from the reactions of the environment. Such explorers are accustomed tothe hypercomplexity of society, and learn to navigate their lives almost by osmosis, without
conscious application. They learn from events that teach them how to be part of a systemic
rationality. Many have made immense progress in this art of finely piloting the course of
events, based on intimate knowledge and intuitive perception of the underlying processes.

A New Social FabricAs they change, people feed the development of a new social fabric that reinforces theirtransformation. Historically, people arrived in a preformed society that slotted them into
place and shaped them, whereas today they arrive in a flexible and permissive society thatthey themselves help shape. Modern, autonomous individuals are quietly withdrawing fromofficial society and its moribund institutions. Field research shows that as they search forwarm personal connections and less stressful relations, they give life to a radically new social
fabric. This fabric is extremely complex, by interwoven, sloppy and fluctuating links of every
size. It feeds a non-hierarchical society that regulates and organizes itself. The real power ofordinary people – generated through their networks and the organic structures they create
to influence the course of events – is increasing. Deeper forms of democracy are seeking toemerge, and new types of organisms are developing, with one foot in the economic world andthe other in the societal one. People at the heart of these activities, baptized “entreprenauts”

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at Sociovision, are simultaneously entrepreneurs and skillful navigators in a web of multiple
networks (the Internet being one of their most useful tools).
Inquiries show that these entreprenauts and their organizations have numerous traits incommon. Their primary motive is not to make money, but to procure enjoyable lives thatgive them a sense of meaning. They make use of, and help develop, new information andcommunication technologies. They do not always fit into the categories used by organizedeconomies and the finance industry, nor even into the arthritic institutions of representative
democracy. In their socioeconomy, durable vitality and success come from synergistic meetings and interdependences, from the capacity to participate in interacting networks. These
networks may be inspired by geography (clusters) or result from contacts in the local/global
telecommunications networks. Industrial and business enterprises and powerful bureaucracies
are themselves invaded by networks of shared sympathies or interests that develop
spontaneously in the crevices of their structures and organigrams. Major companies,
champions in the economic and financial dimensions of life, can no longer neglect thesocietal dimensions of their strategies, for new societal dimensions are now interacting withthem at every level.

Emerging Forms of GovernanceA new kind of governance – one that can adapt to the levels of complexity in society, haveeffective influence on the course of events, and improve the comfort and vitality of the socialorganism – is beginning to emerge. By governance I mean the effective capacity to influence
the course of events in the short and/or long term in a chosen direction. Good governancecontributes to positioning the organism on a road in its environment that is both durably
comfortable and energizing.
Forms of governance and the processes of civilization are and have always been interde-

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pendent. In the society that is coming into being, the practices of governance and socio-technological forms are mutually selective.
Authoritarian governance from above, whether based on the hierarchical tropisms (desire
for power combined with a tendency to obey), or on the application of force (as well as
short-sighted voluntarism), function less well in a hypercomplex society peopled by relatively autonomous persons. Powerful seniors who consider themselves still to be in positionsof power and think they know the right answers (whether for technocratic or for ideologicalreasons), hang on tight to their hard power and systematically make use of unilateral authority or force. In this manner they create turbulence, conflict, and perverse effects. In themedium or long term, they cannot achieve their goals. The developmental process therefore
tends to select them out. Yet it is true that such types accentuate the pre-chaotic character ofany systems within which they are active, increasing the probability that thesesystems will switch abruptly from a chaotic state to a new order – one that In the society that
could just as well be far outside the line of development of the civilizationis coming into being,process as within it.
Others, whether powerful seniors or newly influential arrivals, invent bet- the practices ofter informed and more subtle forms of governance, adapted to an ongoing governance anddevelopment process. They know that their power is both limited and shared.
They act by relying on knowledge or intuition about latencies, and about socio-technologicalauto-organizing and self-regulating systems, intimate processes that underlie
forms are mutually
the course of events. These actors help produce harmony and vitality as they
selective.
influence the civilization process. Their contributions reinforce that civilization process, which in turn feeds their increasing influence, thus selecting them in a positive
manner.
Passage from a hierarchic, simplified society to one that is heterarchic and hypercomplex
tends to modify the distribution of influentials (those who exercise de facto influence in real
governance). The capacity for influence of those who were weak grows, while the influenceof those who occupy positions of hierarchic power diminishes, until they learn to exercise
influence in a governance adapted to the situation. Governance that works, that orients thesocio-systems concerned in an effective manner, becomes a cooperative activity involving
diverse actors, among which ordinary people do not occupy minor positions.
Everyone who feels a responsibility for exercising influence on the course of events is,whether they know it or not, going through an apprenticeship for a new world, castingaround to find new forms of governance that feel suitable. This concerns the traditionally
powerful such as fathers of families, directors of businesses, and government leaders, as wellas the new power-carriers that are emerging. Real but uneven progress has been made: we
see great strides in families and in the emerging socioeconomy, but much less progress instates and their structures and in established “big business.” For the present, we’re still far
from the critical mass necessary to shift in a broad and institutional way to these new formsof governance.

Families
Families have changed profoundly. In Western countries the proportion of those who thinkthat the father of a family should be the boss in the home has been in steady decline during
the past 30 years. In France, for example, 60% thought this in 1974 and 41% in 1984; only
29% thought this in 1999. Quite apart from opinions and values, this phenomenon affects

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the reality of families’ functioning and behavior. A study carried out by Sociovision Cofremca
has shown that in France in 1995, hierarchic families represented only 15–20% of the total.
Half of these were patriarchal, and half matriarchal. Those who lived in patriarchal families
said that people were continually quarrelling. The study also showed that in 1995 nearly
two-thirds of French families were clearly heterarchic, in which everyone had their say, andthe father had a certain degree of influence only if he was sufficiently adept.
This evolution is moving in the same direction everywhere, but in 2000 varied considerably from country to country: 10% of Swedes thought that the father of a family should be
the boss, 20% of Germans, and approximately 30% of the British, French, and Italians.
These figures rise to 40% in Spain, 45% in the U.S., and 74% in Brazil.

Nation States and Governments
Broadly speaking, there are four intersecting phenomena today that tend to destabilize nation
states and most governments. First, ordinary people, in becoming more autonomous, are nolonger satisfied by a representative democracy that installs a power from which they then feelincreasingly distant, and which they consider too controlling. Second, top-down governanceis losing its efficacy in a social fabric that is increasingly hypercomplex. Third, the advanced
globalization of the economy and the more timid globalization of civil society diminish theimportance of the national unit, which is where states exercise their power. Finally, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc put an end to the cold war, making the worldwide geopolitical game
more fluid.
More or less democratic as the case may be, states and their governments are sovereign
within their own territories. This sovereignty can be reduced to two characteristics: (1) states

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are the legal monopolists of violence within their frontiers and can therefore constrain theircitizens, who for the most part tend toward obedience; and (2) their relationships with otherstates are based on economic and military power, with or without the use of violence, leading
in extreme situations to war, annexation, and/or oppression. This system is slowly breaking
up, and could be in the process of transformation into a system in which local, national, andglobal governance become a matter for concerted action, open to the participation of a multiplicity of actors, from public authorities to ordinary people. But we are still a long way fromanything of this nature.

Toward a New Political Governance
Today, even in the most democratic countries, democracy is inadequate for autonomous
people eager to participate in the course of events relevant to them. The citizens elect theirrepresentatives and benefit from a certain degree of protection of the individual, but the governments govern from the top down, in an authoritarian manner inspired by technocratic or
ideologically partisan rationalizations, and the law of the majority is imposed on minorities.
However, the ordinary people that constitute the civil society are gaining influence on governments and states’ functioning. And states are making adjustments.
For instance, during the past quarter century, associations and NGOs that have sprung
more or less directly from the ordinary people have multiplied and gained leverage. Nationaland regional public authorities turn more often to associations to carry out complex missions
that they themselves are ill-prepared to handle. But it remains difficult for formally constituted authorities to abandon the notion that their formal structure gives them a position ofsuperiority over the organizations they wish to use. The international organizations are penetrated to the core by NGOs. We have seen cases in which the network of NGOs and ordinary people linked by the Internet have been able to force multinationals, states, and evennetworks of states to give ground.
Nevertheless, the majority of governments in the most-modern countries have not yet
found how to imagine, design, and install administrations at ease with modernity and able toestablish symbiotic relations with the society of ordinary people. And many of them have losta great part of their ability to govern. For example, the U.S. government proclaims that it
wants to make the country the leader of the world, yet its efforts have only degraded thecountry’s image and shredded the “sympathy capital” it may have had. Similarly, Frenchgovernments on the left and the right have been promising for decades to reduce unemployment, yet unemployment is a long-term and persistent problem that shows no signs of abating. In these countries, those who make their careers in government and administration have
not yet understood how to govern a modern society. They have neither the glasses with which
to see and understand, nor the knowledge of how to act. Theirs is a problem of creativity andapprenticeship.

A New Take on the Balance of PowerThe current process of civilization has yielded new actors, as we have just illustrated, andhas reduced the effective action and the legitimacy of violence. During the 1990s, the system
inherited from the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 (which maintained a balance of power
between sovereign states in Europe) began to crumble in the face of the concerted influencesof a wide variety of factors.

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Feature ■ de Vulpian 9• Local and regional powers. During the 1990s, the local/regional scene began to gain in
importance against the national one. This smaller locus is the site of the greatest contributions to social and economic vitality, and affects people most directly. This is the levelat which the majority of newly formed links emerge in the increasing complexity ofsociety. Nationalist ideologies fade, institutionalized governance adjusts, and the trend
toward decentralization broadens.
• International enterprises. In the current context of globalization, states locked insidetheir own national territories lose some of their powers of constraint over multinational business.
• Globalized civil society. Associations, charitable networks, diasporas, and religious orpolitical movements (e.g., Islamist, fundamentalist, pro-Israeli, pacific, oneworlders, etc.)
have become globalized, exert pressure, circulate money and ideas, organize demonstrations, and even sponsor terrorist attacks.
• Networking among states. A complex network of states in complicity and in conflictis permanently reforming and changing, tending to become a system in its own right. It
replaces the fixed blocs of the cold war. Flexible and interactive supranational groups
form. Each state is thus caught in an interplay (of constraints, opportunities, andthreats) that devalues simple power in favor of skillful maneuvering. Some states try toresist this trend. Among these is the most powerful of the lot, the U.S. However, as
Joseph Nye has very clearly shown, even the most economically and militarily powerfulstate on the planet is not omnipotent.4 The mishaps of the Bush adminis-tration in Iraq
illustrate this very well.
• For more than half a century, Europe has been organizing its own existence. This is aprocess that no single person or group of people is steering, but which many actors are
influencing. It advances, retreats, and bifurcates, but still continues its process. At one
time many thought the result would be the creation of another empire – a United Statesof Europe with supranational powers. It now appears more likely that it will end in thecreation of a system of pacific, post-state and post-national, governance whose orientation will emerge from a complex confrontation of different influences.
In this dawn of the twenty-first century, humanity is confronted with an accumulation ofvital threats. For example, the unequal distribution of wealth, climatic warming, the returnof warring religions, terrorism, gathering epidemics, etc. Such challenges can be met only bya planet-wide system of concerted governance. The process of civilization is pushing us
toward it, but we have a long way to go. And we may not get there in time.

The Role of Big Business
The source of strength of most big business in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – thechain of command, top-down control and organization, standardization, repetition, bureaucracy, forecasting and planning, division of labor, mass marketing, empire building, mechanical thinking, and predatory attitudes – has become a handicap. Businesses today, big or small,are faced with a redoubtable challenge, even (or especially) when they don’t realize it clearly.
They must invent or discover their own forms of adjustment to people’s evolution, to thechanging social fabric, and to emerging technologies that open up new domains of thought

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and action. The process of modernization is transforming them, whether they know it or not,and they have to re-interpret capitalism.
During the 1970s and 1980s, businesses more or less consciously sought to find out how
to synergize with modernity. But the effort was piecemeal and usually encountered enormous
resistance from within the companies concerned, so that by 1990 they still did not know how
to make the most of the potential of modernity. Globalization and intensifying competition led many of them to tighten up everywhere they could in a frantic effort to increase
profitability. They merely deepened the gulf that was already separating them from thesociety of people.

Brilliant Intuitions and Inconsistent Application
A few companies were out in front. They had an intuitive understanding of the change inprogress and made partial responses to it. I had the good fortune to witness three cases fromup close.
In the early 1970s, under the impulsion of André Bénard and Pierre Wack, Royal Dutch/
Shell developed a system of strategic planning by scenarios. Pierre Wack had perceived thatin a world that was growing more complex, traditional forecasts lost their relevance and should be replaced by multidimensional scenarios. He laid out his
scenarios with an extremely original perspective: instead of trying to imagine different futures, starting from a rational
analysis of possibilities, he sought to use
his networks of contacts to locate the processes of transformation that were alreadyunder way and to envisage the ways inwhich real life could combine them. He
had opened the door to a completely systemic perspective. He thought that responsible senior managers, confronted withscenarios that rang true, would change
their mental maps of the world. Pierre
Wack’s innovative lessons made slow
progress in the business community.
In the same period, propelled by its
young president, Per Gyllenhammar, Volvo
became aware that Swedish workers were
becoming more autonomous and that it
would soon not be possible to get them towork on assembly lines. So in 1974 creative imagination at Volvo led to the automobile industry’s first great rupture withtraditional assembly line production, which
was replaced by autonomous teams.

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This was also the period when François Dalle, the President of L’Oréal, began to investigate what he called “parallel hierarchies.” He had seen that a business was a living organism,and that in the interstices of management and trade-union hierarchies, living networks weredeveloping spontaneously and producing their own leaders. He realized that senior management could tap into these networks and make use of them.
In many businesses during the 1970s and 1980s, initiatives were undertaken to meet theprocess of civilization. Management began to talk of human resources rather than “personnel,” making allusion to inner resources that were probably underutilized, and perhaps possible to mobilize to the benefit of both workers and the business. Management by objectives
became current practice, quality groups were introduced and multiplied, and attempts were made to reduce the drag of hierarchized
In 1974 creative
bureaucracy and to provide increased room for responsibility andimagination at Volvo
initiative. More-or-less spontaneous developments in micro-telecommunications technology began to transform the pyramid of topled to the first great
down internal communication into interactive conversation.
rupture with tradiBut responses to what was and is a global challenge were partial
tional assembly line
and sketchy. Employees were modernizing at least as fast as theircompanies. By the end of the 1980s it became evident that the gap
production, which
between them had not been substantially reduced: no general adwas replaced byvance had been made in making good use of the “human resources”
in personnel. In 1975, a majority of employees in France dreamed ofautonomous teams.
fulfillment in their jobs; by 1985, many of them wanted a job thatwould leave them time to fulfill themselves elsewhere.
Marketing modernized without radically transforming itself. During the 1970s and 1980s,
it was not unusual to find heads of companies or marketing directors who dreamed of putting
their enterprises in total synergy with the diversity of their consumers and the developmentsin their sensitivities. In their attempts to achieve this goal, some business leaders distanced
themselves from massive abstract categories such as “my market,” “the consumer,” or “thehousewife under 50,” and drew closer to the realities of living, complex people. Some brokeaway from the idea of influencing and manipulating potential customers in favor of interactive adjustment through dialogue. Market research tools that were both quantitative andpsychosocially pertinent became widespread. Business started identifying favorable ongoingsocial developments they could use without drowning in complexity. Some companies learned
to seize the crucial moment of a reversal in sensitivities for their product launches.
This was progress, of a sort. But it has to be admitted that by the end of the 1980s a truly
dialoguing micro-marketing had not yet been discovered or invented. The majority of businesses were not in fact symbiotic with their consumers. Observatories described “consumer
fatigue,” which marketing tried to overcome by stepping up advertising pressure or conducting price wars. As consumption became blocked or satiated in the more-modern countries,
advertisers looked for business development in countries newly open to consumer-orientedcompetition, where numerous potential client segments were still easy to conquer by wellworn mass-marketing techniques.
The majority of senior managements in all the Western countries saw at the end of the
1980s that people’s expectations with regard to businesses had changed. From being principally financial and transactional, they were increasingly becoming relational, societal, moral,
and ecological. Nevertheless, the vast majority of businesses were able to respond to this demand
only with a transformation or two and a large volume of opportunistic communications.

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Divorce: Traditional Big Business vs.
The Society of Ordinary People
At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the rapid globalization of the economy and an explosion in communications networks intensified competition. Simultaneously,
a conjunction of factors reduced the importance of managers in favor of the shareholders. A
new and somewhat caricatural version of capitalism appeared, leading a number of publicly
held companies into competition centered on shareholder value. The businesses concerned
were (and are) valued, and judge themselves, by the quarterly or even daily movement ofshare price, which of course makes them the slaves of short-term hopes and fears linked tomedia announcements and anticipation of profits.
Some companies began to explore modernity and invested in the authentic learning processes required by it. The majority, under pressure to produce urgent results and without therequisite knowledge, turned away to better-known territory. They gambled on mechanicalimprovements and rationalizations in their organizations or strategies, at the price of degrading their internal climates and their relations with their own social ecosystems.
They devised more effective organizations, tightened everything, and required faster andmore-efficient work, often through the use of new technologies. Such management practices,
without taking account of local human conditions, have often greatly increased stress. They
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Feature ■ de Vulpian 13

levels of production with fewer employees, it led to massive layoffs. The flexible working
hours desired by employees, in particular by women, were transformed into flexibility
imposed and controlled from above. As computers became more integral to the workplace,they were used not to increase freedom and interdependences among personnel but to discipline and accelerate. Management introduced computer-driven systems for managing clients
relations, and computerized telephone systems that rigidify and dehumanize vocal communication.
During the 1990s, surgical operations multiplied. Companies sought economies of scaleand rationalized their perimeters. Bits were cut off here or added on there. Complex living
business entities were chopped up. Recombinations took no heed of the existing cultures offorcibly merged teams. Enormous enterprises were created with no underlying social, cultural, or human realities. Such was the casual negligence of history, of experience, of accumulated knowledge, and of collective intelligence.
These efforts bore fruit: profits of such companies quadrupled between 1982 and 2000.
But there was a price to pay. Competition centered on shareholder value locked a considerable proportion of large companies into a closed financial universe, segregated from the surrounding social, human, and sometimes even economic, realities. Priority given to short-term
profit was exactly out of step with the processes of modernization, which place the emphasison human fulfillment, durable vitality, protection of the environment, andmeaning in life.
By the end of theThis divorce between big business and the society of ordinary people
1990s, the number
has had very serious consequences. The divide between companies andof people whose work their workers grows wider. The deterioration in the moral status of large
companies increases the degree of confrontation. And finally, their ability
appeared meaningless to be self-guiding and to survive diminishes.
By the end of the 1990s, all the observatories of change in the mostand who felt themmodern countries noted an increase in levels of stress and frustration
selves subject to un- linked to work and to the practices of large companies and administrations. The number of people whose work appeared meaningless and who
reasonable degrees
felt themselves subject to unreasonable degrees of constraint rose steadily.
of constraint rose
Quite apart from the general relativization of work, behaviors arose thatsteadily.
were dangerous for the company: complicities for mutual protection andto work as little as possible, resistance to any change in organization
imposed from above and affecting personal lives, the brain drain of young or skilled staff
away from large companies and public administration, and dreams of early retirement “to beable to do develop independent and interesting work.”
In several European countries a growing majority of employees thought that their own
interests and those of their companies were divergent. This feeling grew among junior andmiddle management, and in this situation are the outlines of a dangerous opposition: shareholders and business leaders one side, and the living company entity on the other.
The public image of large organizations deteriorated during the last decade of the century.
Previously, this image had in fact improved when leading companies benefited from the discredit that bureaucratic administration had brought upon itself and business became associated with the hope of a freer and more human world. This honeymoon did not last, and theimage of big business deteriorated sharply, though public sentiment toward small businesses
remained quite positive. This loss of moral stature has been observed in all countries at the

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cutting edge of modernity, particularly clearly in the U.S., and more benignly in Germany. In
all the Western countries, between half and sometimes three-quarters of the population thinkthat large organizations do not serve the public interest. Public opinion everywhere has registered the growing discord between traditional big business and its employees. In France, forexample, the proportion of those who consider that the interests of business are usually opposed to the interests of employees has grown continuMost people find no
ously since 1985.
meaning in business
There are numerous grounds for complaint. Most people find no
meaning in business that spends its time in financial games, that sells offthat apparently hasa bit here or grabs a bit there, that sacks a chunk of its work force, andthat apparently has no interest in internal social harmony nor in the qual- no interest in internal
ity of life of its employees. Big business is criticized for making children
social harmony nor
work in developing countries, for experimenting on animals, for polluin the quality of lifetion, for poisoning our food, for firing people even while it is making
profits, for not caring at all about the development or quality of their sur- of its employees.
rounding communities, for disrespecting consumers, and for disregarding
the quality of their products or services. Corporations’ efforts to convince staff and the public otherwise have frequently been perceived as artificial pretense and attempts at manipulation. Polls have shown that some of these efforts had more negative than positive effects,
except perhaps on shareholders. The increasing frequency, during the last decade of the century, of more-or-less-criminal collusion between powerful businesses and political leaders has
not helped the big business cause.
The generally younger people in the anti-business lobby know how to whip up emotion
and catalyze waves of discontent. Charismatic leaders sometimes emerge from this contingent, and their instinctive knowledge of how to use media and micro-communications makes
them all the more redoubtable, surfing as they do on a current of public sympathy that supports the small against the powerful, the local against the general, and the social against thefinancial.
The survivability of a whole section of traditional businesses is in question. Cut off bothfrom the people who are changing and from the social fabric that is becoming more complex,
these businesses are not developing the piloting skills or the understanding of governance thatthe situation requires. Their directors and managers can see the gradual erosion of their ability to order, to organize from above, and to influence the course of events. They exhaustthemselves in establishing chains of command that don’t work, in exercising their authority
on people who want to be self-determining, and in trying to manipulate men and women who
will do only as they think fit. Their inopportune orders trigger perverse or unexpected results.
Consumers escape their grasp, or become increasingly expensive to win over.
If leaders of big business and the financial establishments remain insensitive to this unease
and the resulting polarization, or do not soon mount appropriate responses, protests may
become envenomed and the widening gap between business and ordinary people translate todestructive divorce. In that tableau, stress and confrontation will flourish. While large companies make cuts in their workforces, a new socioeconomy, based on individual initiatives
and informal processes, will develop and undermine their domain. The ordinary reactions ofordinary people will cause increasingly destructive developments in traditionally managed
businesses through internal dysfunction and serious societal crises. It is not impossible thatsuch social disturbances could last for decades.

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An historical example merits consideration. The development of industrial enterprise during the nineteenth century gave rise to the development of a revolutionary proletariat thatlaunched a virulent attack on free market enterprise, encouraging the development of aggressive
trade unions and violent strikes. In some countries this resulted in dictatorships with centralized command economies. It took a century for moderate unions, Fordism, and a triumphantrace for consumption to reintegrate the proletariat into a new dominant societal form. Thereis no reason to suppose that history cannot repeat itself but take a different turn.

Time to Get New Glasses
A great many senior managers have relatively blocked mental attitudes and maps of theworld. The lenses through which they see are the fruits of their own educations and theirprevious professional experiences. We need a sufficient proportion of managers to “get new
glasses” so that big business can participate in the process of discovery and apprenticeship.
This will allow major companies to understand their failings and make the adjustments
necessary to govern more wisely in the modern socioeconomy.2

Actors in the New Socioeconomy
In France and New York we have observed leaders and employees of neo-enterprises, startups, associations, and networks launched during the 1990s. Observations were sufficiently
soon after their launches that the organizations had not yet been deformed by the pressures ofthe financial, economic, institutional, and political environment in which they had to operate.
Their manner of being and self-governance had a number of characteristics in common; thisattracted our attention to the forms of entrepreneurial life which were developing spontaneously at the end of the twentieeth century in societies at the cutting edge of modernity. Major
companies with an awareness of biomimetics could find a source of inspiration here.
The people behind each of the business adventures have a very evident entrepreneurial
spirit. However, unlike the classic image of the entrepreneur, they plunged into their activity
not to make money, but to procure a life that really suits them, and gives them a sense of
meaning and an outlet for their vitality – and if there’s money in it as well, so much the better.
Many started out with a radical innovation that with hindsight, appears to have filled agap. An activity that had meaning for them also had meaning for people like them who
became collaborators or clients. In this manner, the latent energies of all concerned are put
to use, and they become “activists for the cause,” and “spreaders of the gospel.” For suchpeople, added meaning is a primordial source of value.
In the ventures of these entrepreneurs (aka their “organisms”), hierarchies are not clearly
defined. Initiatives are taken and leadership improvised on all levels. But one or more leaderswith sufficient charisma (rather than a reliance on structured hierarchy) may exercise a strong
influence on the whole and tend to be seen as the incarnation of the enterprise.
These animators of new organisms do far more than just listen to their collaborators andclients inside a bottom-up organization. When we interviewed them we saw that they didn’t
feel like the masters of a situation who were bending down to listen, but rather as actors
among others in a complex system in which they were trying to find the most advantageousinteractions. They had an orientation toward dialogue and interactive adjustment, and foundit all the easier to feel others, both personnel and clients, because they often resembled each

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Characteristics of Old- and New-Paradigm Orientations
OLD

NEW

Feel powerful, sovereign, at the center ofthe world, able to impose one’s will

Feel an element in an ecosystem whose future can (perhaps)
be influenced; be on the lookout for windows of opportunity;
accompany the processes of surrounding life

Governors are there to govern

Governors are there to ensure that the enterprise iseffectively self-governing

See the world as a mechanic, a technician,an expert, a legal advisor

See the world through the eyes of a gardener or a therapeutic
specialist, as a living system with which one interacts

Study; know; decide; plan

Listen; be on the lookout for adjustments, synergies anddialogues; feel one’s way

Effective action is what is decided by the
director who knows where she or he wants
to go

Effective action is what is inspired by an intimate knowledgeof the living processes that underlie the course of eventsShow others that what they do ismeaningful

Give others the opportunity to discover the meaning of what
they doLook for generally applicable recipes thathave proved their worth

Know that each particular case require specific diagnosis
and treatment

A narrow strategic field (industrial,
economic, financial)

A broad strategic field (including social, societal, andecological dimensions)other in their shared modernity of outlook. These people tune in to the living fabric of society,deriving inspiration or support from it. They spontaneously make use of micro-communication technologies in this spirit of creative adjustment, rather than managing through theestablishment of control with a corresponding reduction in liberty and freedom of action.
The resulting organisms seem well adapted to a changing world. The diversity of people
on their teams is often striking, and prepares everyone to react to a wide variety of events andto find positive interactions. In spite of differences, team members have a cohesive feeling.
This combination of unity and diversity increases their chances of performing well in a mutating environment.
The collective intelligence of these organisms is often very developed. The long-term
visions of the future are shared by all the personnel. Generally, the entire team is on the lookout for jump-cuts in the streaming environment that surrounds them, and seeks the rightadjustment. A collective understanding of adjustments and desynchronizations in progress is
encouraged, creating the impression of a spontaneously functioning system of strategic
adjustment between the organism and its environment. It’s noteworthy that other actors
operating in the same market (or in the same universe) are not systematically perceived as
enemies, or even as competitors, but rather as partners.

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A New Evolutionary Stage for Human Society?
The human species wavers between liberal and authoritarian forms of organization. Our
hunter-gatherer ancestors were organized in small, relatively egalitarian groups for some
100,000 years, with little difference in power and status between members. The leadershipshifted according to circumstances without need for formal appointment to a position of
authority. Then, some 10,000–12,000 years ago, the groups became more numerous, andwith the development of agriculture and animal domestication, became more sedentary.
Authority was strengthened, locally centralized, and stabilized. Monarchies
were instituted.
With the growth in
Humanity has invented the state more than once; the oldest attempts wepeople’s autonomy,
know of were only five or six thousand years ago. Norbert Elias has
the social fabric has shown how, after the end of the Middle Ages, the centuries-old process ofdevelopment of civilization in the West gave rise to the state as the soverbecome more intereign monopolist of violence within its territory. From this Western initiaactive, and centraltive the world began to divide into nations, each governed by a statemachinery. During the twentieth century some of these nation-statesized authority has
sought to exercise control over every aspect of life.
lost its efficacy.
However, another dynamic was also at work. Its most recent phase (theRenaissance and the Reformation, the Illumination, and the American andFrench revolutions) found Westerners in search of individual emancipation and personal happiness. They undertook to free themselves from rigid authority and inflexible taboos.
Progressively, some amount of democracy crept into our political regimes and our societal
lives. (“A certain amount” because democratically elected governments and heads of economic activities continued to govern on the basis of appointed authority.)
Today things are not quite the same. With the growth in people’s autonomy, the social
fabric has become more interactive, and centralized authority has lost its efficacy. Perhaps
today we are taking a decisive step in the direction of a deeper, post-national and post-state
form of democracy and/or social structure. The society that we can only glimpse at present
would be heterarchic, largely self-organized and self-regulated, and possessing a greatly
enlarged margin for personal initiative. Sovereign states may give way to a variety of public
powers at various levels, with partnerships between them and with a multitude of nonstate,nongovernmental organisms. Because of the extreme rapidity of technical progress in microcommunication, the development of efficient, planet-wide (as well as local) self-regulation
has become imaginable and possibly achievable.6
There is an opportunity for human progress whose birth we can try to facilitate. But it isvery clear that nothing has yet been decisively acquired. Our hypercomplex and living society
is also, like all living things, the seat of pathological processes. The therapeutic procedures,
regulators, or immune systems that are spontaneously developing are not yet properly effective, in particular because many governments and old-fashioned-but-still-powerful enterprises are not playing the game of a living society. They display ideologically partisan,hierarchic, or predatory attitudes, rather than therapeutic, interactive ones, and accumulate
mistakes and maladaptations that generate perverse effects. Instead of participating in concerted, adaptive regulation, they throw oil on the fire and accentuate the turbulence. Beyond
a hypothetical (because unmeasured) threshold of turbulence, the entire anthropo-sociologicalprocess could bifurcate into disastrous directions.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alain de Vulpian, a sociologist and ethnologist, founded Cofremca, a think tank, research andconsulting organization 50 years ago. He is chairman of Sociovision, an international offshoot of
Cofremca. Its activities consist of observing people in their everyday lives and conducting systematic research on change in modern societies. In the 1960s, he devised an empirical tool for thedetection, follow-up and anticipation of socio-cultural change that is now being used in a numberof countries. He is a member of SoL France and of the Global Business Network.
vulpian@sociovision.fr

Endnotes
1

David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1950) and Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics(New Haven, Yale University Press, 1952)

2

Norbert Elias, Über den prozess der zivilisation (Basel: Haus zum Falken, 1939)

3

Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-fulfilment in a World Turned Upside Down (NewYork: Random House, 1981)

4

Joseph Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone

5(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Arie de Geus, The Living Company: Habits for Survival in a Turbulent Business Environment (Boston:
Harvard Business School Press, 1997)

6

Thomas Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organisation,
Your Management Style and Your Life (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004)

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Feature ■ de Vulpian 19

COMMENTARY

Commentary
By Arie de Geus
The underlying theme of Alain de Vulpian’s

to people, to social fabric and to technologies

essay is one with which I struggled at variousthat have already gone through a half century

moments in my life. It is the theme thatof fundamental change.

“People change and in so doing they change
the society in which they live.”

Arie de Geus

Quite apart from the slowness of this process,I learned another lesson later in my professional

My first encounter with this theme was atlife. Yes, indeed, people do slowly change theuniversity. In those days a German philosophi-

society at large, but only if they are a member

cal school of thought called “Personalismus”

of and part of that society! Standing outside

still had many adherents in the Netherlands.

a society and kicking at it – shouting that it

Its founder was a Hamburg professor, calledshould change – is not very effective. You have

William Stern, a forerunner of Piaget. Central

to be a member of the society or community

in the work of both these developmental psy-that needs changing.

chologists is the inter-relationship between theindividual and the world around them. Whereas
Piaget concentrated on the process by which
the individual, all through his/her life, adjustsand develops to stay in harmony with that world(i.e. the basic process of life, also known as“learning”), Stern gave much attention to thereciprocity in the relationship between the individual and the society at large. Both change
and both change each other by a process hecalled “introception.” Change works in both
directions, but very slowly!

This argument was key in the anti-apartheid
debate in the 1980s. Quite a heated debate it
was! An outspoken anti-apartheid movement was
advocating a policy of “Get out of the country
and boycott them,” with some multi-national
businesses like my own, caught in the middle.
Notwithstanding the pressure that was put on
it, Shell decided to remain in the country andto try to be an agent of change from the insiderather than join the outside forces. As readersof Reflections know from articles published byAdam Kahane, this decision turned out to be an

Alain de Vulpian describes convincingly how

effective one. Shell’s planning processes as wellthis change process has been at work over theas Shell people contributed to both the aboli-

last 50 years and he gives us some idea abouttion of apartheid and to the formulation of thethe time scale. Changes in people’s behaviour

post-apartheid policies of the Mandela govern-

and their value system that started in the 1950s

ment. A long and painful episode had provedand ’60s, finally made it into the family unit

the old German professor William Stern to havedecades later. But, at the turn of the century,

been right: Real change can only come fromthey are still far from being absorbed in busi-

the inside.

ness and nation states. He describes how
ways of governance and the exercise of power
still put handicaps in the way of adjustment

20 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 4/5

I believe that we better keep this in mind alsowith regard to the changes that are becoming
more and more necessary in business following

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the changes in people and social values that

constraints” and the hard place of shareholder

Alain de Vulpian is describing. Most businesses,

power, exercised by financial institutions-with-he says, are out of step and out of line withshort-term financial goals. Two hundred years

their employees and with their customers. He

ago, the Nation-State went through a similar

mentions a number of reasons: excessive con-period of tension between a more mature peo-

centration on shareholder interests – new tech-ple and an encrusted power base. The French

nologies used to tighten up organisations – use

Nation broke that tension with a revolution.

of computers to dehumanise communications

Maybe we need a French revolution in thewith customers. Alain puts most of the blame

business world to prevent the possible confron-at the feet of top management and directors:

tation between emancipated people andinsensitive, blocked mental attitudes – “theybusiness as de Vulpian mentions.

need new glasses.” Their way of governing needschanging. Less pyramidical hierarchy, less paternalism, less teaching and more learning – and,hopefully, the retention of their own people will
improve and there will be less divorce between
big business and the society of ordinary people.

Alain is not completely pessimistic. He has seen
and observed new actors who could possibly
help the system to switch to a new order. And,
indeed, signs are visible that could be pointers
towards adaptations of the business world tothe new realities of its people. It is even quite

In this debate, however, it is necessary topossible to think that these adaptations could

introduce the element of the origin of powertake place by evolution, rather than revolution.

and the way it is exercised in business. In ourFirstly, some by-products of the historical devel-

democratic societies, the source of power is

opment of industrial enterprise in the 19th cen-embedded in the Law and any change in thetury are coming in handy in today’s situation.

power structure will have to wind its (slow) way

Notably, they allow business to avoid altogether

through the legislative process. That is part ofthe destructive influence of the predator/

the slowness of societal adaptation. Slightly

shareholder. Examples are:cynical, one could say that in democratic societies “Laws are today’s write-up of yesterday’s
solution for the day-before-yesterday’s situation.” In that sense, the Company Law in mostcountries still describes the 19th century society of the business corporation-as-a-machine.
Unfortunately, it is that Law that allocates tothe shareholder the ultimate and supreme
power (of hire, fire, sell and break-up and selfremuneration) in business corporations. Mostof the time, it also spells out the obligations ofmanagement to serve that shareholder before
anyone else. Until that Law is changed, it puts
management between the rock of emancipatedpeople “liberated from earlier social and moral

Cooperatives. The ultimate power in cooperatives is in the hands of their members. In somecooperatives the members are the employees,
in others their customers. Whichever it is, theresulting system of distributed power leads toa closer alignment and adaptation between thebusiness and their people or their customers.
As in a democratic Nation-State, the decision
taking becomes more open, slower and more
frustrating. But implementation of the decisions
and long-term stability is far superior and fasterthan in a pre-French Revolution power structure.
Interesting examples of the success of theseold forms of governance structure in today’s© 2005, Society for Organizational Learning. All Rights Reserved.

reflections.solonline.org

Commentary ■ de Geus 21

world are: the RABO Bank (owned by its customers)

than 20% per year to become inside 25 years

in The Netherlands (the only financial institution

the business enterprise with likely the highest

in the world with a triple AAA rating) and Mon-

market value in the world. Members of the SoL

dragon, a relatively young cooperative in Northern

community have the opportunity to experiment

Spain of which the employees are the members

and play a role in the development of similar

and which is one of the most successful andnew organisational and power structures, everfastest growing businesses in Western Europe.

since a chance meeting between Peter Senge

Partnerships. In their original form they wereorganisational structures that were made-tomeasure for the old, authoritarian, male governance system. However, some far sighted andwise senior partners succeeded to switch to asystem of (more) distributed power which, at thesame time, made it impossible for one genera-

and Dee Hock, the architect and honorary President of VISA International, led to the first blueprint of a world wide SoL organization. This
blueprint is still evolving and SoL members cantake part in its evolution and learn first handabout developing a modern multi-national
structure.

tion of partners to “rape the common” at the

Alain de Vulpian finishes his essay on a pessi-

expense of future generations. Sometimes, thismistic note. The last words of the last paragraph

was done by setting up a Trust. Examples are theare that the slow process of adapting society’s

consultants McKinsey & Co, Booz-Allen & Hamilton,

structure to its new autonomous people “could

Inc. and the John Lewis Partnership (a UK retailbifurcate into disastrous directions.” Indeed,business). Yet again, the examples are quite

notwithstanding the undeniable world classsuccessful businesses.

successes (old and new) of alternative organisa-

Other signs point to a new order. Even withouta change in the Company Law, members of theemancipated generation have begun to experiment with new organisational and power structures. One promising attempt is to give new business the structure of a “Club-with-Constitution,”wherein the Constitution lays down the rules thattional and leadership forms, the fact remainsthat many businesses are vulnerable to outside
predators and internal governance disasters. It
could bring high corporate death rates which
are in nobody’s interest, except perhaps somesmall groups of lawyers, bankers and financial
consultants.

prevent any party from grabbing absolute hier-Business is important. It produces the material

archical power and, at the same time, creates

wealth we take for granted. A painful divorce

better conditions for a heterarchic leadership andbetween business and its emancipated peoplehigh levels of self-organization and self-regula-

could have dire social and economic conse-tion. Possibly, the most spectacular example isquences for nation states and society at large.

VISA International – by many measures the mostsuccessful business of the last 25 years. Born

Arie de Geus

out of a loss-making credit card business, it has

ariedeg@aol.com

been growing for many years at rates of more

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COMMENTARY

Commentary
By Anne Murray Allen

Anne Murray Allen

Without question, in writing “Listening to Ordi-

And the world changed. The most noticeablenary People,” Alain de Vulpian has provoked

force was the establishment and broad adop-

our thinking about the evolution of all our soci-tion of the internet. Change in technology andetal institutions over the last 50 years or more.

quick access to others around the globe meant

As people living at this moment in time, we

new rules in an increasingly more complex

experience tremendous and growing complexity

and interconnected world. HP’s response to in-– at home, at work, around the world. Every-

creased competition was similar to that of mostthing we thought we knew is either changing

multi-national companies. The divisions wereor being questioned. Just holding onto a social

reigned in and the company began the journeyfabric that sustains us in these times seemsof learning to be one clear presence to global

incredibly challenging.

customers. The idea was to reduce complexity

When I first read Alain’s article I was struckby the forces and trends he describes. The
fact that he has measured these over decades
makes his premise impossible to dismiss or
ignore. As I thought about my impending retirement from Hewlett-Packard, I could see
the trends Alain describes over the 16 year
period of my tenure.

to our customers and stakeholders but the cost
was increased stress, complexity, and fatigue
for employees. It became impossible to see thelarger social system let alone know if each of
us was having an impact. Governance of thebusiness became more hierarchical and work
lost meaning for most employees. Many people
felt, “My job isn’t hard, it is just hard to do myjob.” Paradoxically people became bored, under-

When I first joined HP in 1989, I was delighted

utilized, and their ideas less legitimate. Yet

to become part of an informal, creative, rela-

corporate success was increasingly and precari-

tively egalitarian social structure. Characteris-

ously measured on short-term profitability andtics and things that human beings yearn forthe connection between long-term financial,and described by Alain in his paper were verysocial, and environmental well-being was over-present in the work environment. Specificallylooked.

these included a feeling of wellbeing, a senseof meaning, and moments of fulfillment atwork. I would call it a very loving environment,
where “love” is defined in Maturana’s terms
as being “legitimate in the eyes of another.”Working in collaborative social systems withina decentralized company we had the luxury of
autonomy and focus and tremendous results
were accomplished.

If Alain’s research and cautions for our future
are correct, there are several ramifications forthe corporation. First, in spite of the pleasantmemories of a simpler time, there will be nogoing back. The interwoven nature of our world,
as Alain so eloquently describes, is here to stay.
Yet reverting to hierarchical governance that wasalso part of an earlier time is not the answer
and is not sustainable. We do truly need todefine new models. If we look at where somereflections.solonline.org■ de■ GeusCommentary
Commentary
Allen 23

of the most creative and breakthrough models

powerful hierarchy to broker this knowledge.

for innovation and value are emerging today, we

Especially for organizations that are large, virtual,learn from enterprises like Linux and Wikipedia.

and global these models must emerge before

They demonstrate that people are willing to do

it is too late.

their best work for the sheer joy of making a contribution that is recognized by their peers. Regardless of societal shifts over time, humans remainsocial beings. Simply working for a corporationthat pays a good salary is not and will not beenough. The best and the brightest want fulfillment, meaning, and an inspiring social structure.
The corporations that succeed in the future willknow how to offer that in addition to a paycheck.
They will create governance and provide leadership that supports these things while demonstrating a moral backbone. This won’t be hierarchicalas we have known it, but rather something that

Alain’s caution is a good one. We cannot takethe future for granted. By reminding ourselvesthat adaptation is not automatic, we must as
he notes “get new glasses” if we are to see thepossibilities as well as the problems. And toaddress these challenges enterprises will needleadership that supports the full engagementof people’s hearts and minds. We will need thisfull engagement if we are to create a future thatlives rather than becomes increasingly moreturbulent and disenfranchised – with potentiallydisastrous results.

enables people to find each other and accessAnne Murray Alleneach other’s knowledge and expertise without

amallen@peak.org

having to depend (and wait) on a small but

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FEATURE

From Fragmentation to Aligning:
Organizational Coaching and Ten Conversations
for Organizing Knowledge Work
By Mark Addleson, Scott Brumburgh, and Raj Chawla

What Can’t We See?

LMark Addlesoninda Nessman, director of administration for Anubiz Corp., is looking out of her officewindow. She has led the major reorganization Anubiz will launch today but has misgivings about it. Despite her team’s best efforts, she feels that things aren’t going tochange. What bothers her is that AC’s well-intentioned efforts during the past five years toempower teams, increase collaboration, and set up a knowledge portal haven’t amounted tomuch. Even with process re-engineering efforts and training programs to improve communications and teamwork, things remain very much as they were.
Chuck Garcia, her boss and the CEO, wanted her to take the lead in “getting people outof silos.” She understands the practical, economic reasons for this. For continued growth, thecompany must increase productivity and overall efficiency while reducing costs. People haveto work across organizational boundaries. There has been a good deal of talk about “fragmentation.” The image this brings to mind is a weak structure: a center that isn’t holding theorganization together. But, so far, their efforts to deal with fragmentation have had little
impact and she is equally unsure about this company-wide reorganization. “Apparently wearen’t getting it. Something is missing. What can’t we see?” she asks herself as she walks to
the door and the formal launch of their reorganization.

Scott Brumburgh

The Issues

Raj Chawla

Though the restructuring of Anubiz Corp is fictional, this vignette highlights our experienceswith a variety of organizations. Government departments and nonprofit organizations, aswell as corporate and other business enterprises, are all restructuring because, according to
the executives, the organizations need to be “adaptable” and “responsive.” “Silos” developed as their organizations grew and what they have now is “fragmentation.” What they
are looking for is “integration” in order to “leverage intellectual capital” (i.e., employees’knowledge), “create better synergies,” and “maintain flexibility.” To achieve these goals theyneed to “streamline business processes,” “downsize,” and “create flatter structures” that will“reduce overhead” and “allow knowledge to flow more freely” through the organization.
This all sounds sensible and the actions seem appropriate. Organizations bring people
together to get things done and dismantling redundant structures has to be worthwhile if thatenables people to work more effectively and efficiently. Yet, in most cases, integration never
happens. Is it an impossible goal? Are restructuring efforts misguided?

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Feature n Addleson, Brumburgh, Chawla 25

Restructuring means redrawing the organization chart. Yet when people speak off therecord about fragmentation that is not what they talk about. We hear them say, “We are notworking effectively” and, “There ought to be a different way of doing things.” And we hearquestions such as:• What does it take to connect, so we can work together effectively?
• Why are employees indifferent – or worse – to their work?
• How do we generate trust within this organization?
• Can we tackle the lack of accountability in this organization?
• Why is it so difficult for people to make mistakes, learn, and support each other?
Three things in particular strike us about these questions. People in many different organizations are asking the same questions; they seem to feel it is beyond their power to address
them; and the questions refer to the culture, not the structure, of organizations, and to thepractices of organizing, not the organization.
These questions and concerns have their roots deep in the “managerial culture” common
to most organizations, especially large ones. In that culture, powerful obstacles to cooperation include separate and competing responsibilities; performance measures that reward
individuals rather than groups; goals framed in terms of the quantity of work (in terms of
inputs or outputs) rather than the quality; and an emphasis on compliance (i.e., following
orders) rather than on people’s accountability to one another for the work they are doing.
Unfortunately, the sources of fragmentation and obstacles to cooperation are widely seen as
cornerstones of efficient management. People argue that these cannot be touched without
destroying what makes organizations successful.
This is a significant problem without easy answers. To appreciate this and to see what canbe done about it, we should first consider why people have to “connect” in order to do theirwork, and then investigate why ordinary management practices prevent this. The final question is, “What does it take to organize work collaboratively?” Those three issues are theframework of this article.

Why Fragmentation?
Words such as “silos,” “stovepipes,” “top,” “bottom,” “integration,” and “fragmentation”
are so common that people use them unthinkingly when talking about their organizations.
Yet, this language confirms that they see organizations as objects, like buildings or machines,that consist of separate parts. In that view, one task of management is to coordinate andintegrate the parts (Morgan 1986).
Of course, organizations are not objects that you can see or touch. It is important toacknowledge this, because the images people have and the language they use to talk about
things are closely related, and both influence what people do (Abram 1997; Berger andLuckmann 1967; Eccles and Nohria 1992; Schrage 1995). Because language, images, andactions are related, the image of organizations as objects is the source of many problems.
Where does this image come from and why is it so problematic?

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Fragmentation is built into conventional structures
If you ask someone to draw her organization, the product usually is a version of the organization chart, as in Figure 1. The organization has an orderly triangular structure, with divisions
and departments, a “top” that comprises senior managers, and a “bottom” consisting ofworkers connected to the top by a “chain-ofFigure 1: The Organizationcommand.”
The image of a triangle is revealing. Its origins are not altogether clear (Hoskin andMacve 1994), but writers who formulated theprinciples of modern management many
decades ago had a structure they thought was
ideal. It looked like a triangle (see Henri Fayol
1916). The organizations they knew andwrote about, however, were manufacturingbusinesses, and the prominence of the triangle
is one sign that organizations are still managed as if they are factories. Behind the triangular structure is the idea that a few people“in charge” think for everyone and tell everybody else what to do.
Factory work in the industrial age consisted
mainly of routine, repetitive, physical activities and the work lives of managers and workers revolved around machines, assembly lines,
and inputs and outputs of things you could see and measure (i.e., goods as opposed to services). “Efficiency and productivity” became a mantra of factory management. Ever since
Adam Smith described the effects of the division of labor, the breaking down of a production
process (into independent “stages” and into separate, smaller operations within units like
departments and divisions) has been a recipe for improving efficiency.
Nowadays, most organizations provide services, or “intangibles,” such as mortgages, convenience (e.g., retail businesses), and software code. Because it takes many people working
together to provide services, they need to cooperate closely. What they do is not at all repetitive and routine but is creative and original. Much of their work is neither observable, normeasurable, nor supervisable, as factory work is, and they have to think, decide, and act on
their own. The management principles and practices invented for factories are completely
inappropriate in service organizations, yet they are run like factories. They are hierarchicaland bureaucratic, divided into layers, divisions, departments, and areas; accounting procedures treat every unit as separate and independent; and people, often grouped by specialization or function, are divided by invisible boundaries. Add competition, and you have people
treating one another as adversaries, and units fighting over their share of the budget, trying
to prevent each other from getting contracts.

Knowledge Work, Conversations, and Aligning1
What is going on in organizations to have dramatically altered the rules for managing
them? The answer is “knowledge work” (Blackler 1995; Buckingham Shum 1996; Conklin
1996; Drucker 1994). Knowledge work is designing a computer game, managing an office,reflections.solonline.org

Feature n Addleson, Brumburgh, Chawla 27

performing a knee replacement, administering environmental policy, organizing shelter for
homeless people, or putting together a marketing campaign. Nearly everyone does knowledge
work. Compared to assembly-line workers, those who work as nurses, landscape designers,
management consultants, IT support people, police, restaurateurs, and teachers deal withissues that are multifaceted and complex and not at all repetitive or routine. What matters
is not people’s manual skills, but what they know, think, believe, and feel (based on theirexperience). Knowledge work is never “individual.” People have to work together, and theirability to interact and share their knowledge is crucial to their work.
The heart of all knowledge work is “meaning making,” or what Karl Weick calls “sensemaking” (Weick 1995; Wenger 1998). Making meaning is a uniquely human phenomenon.
People make meaning when they discuss a task (i.e., when they identify aproblem or issue and ask why it is a problem or whose problem it is), decide
Working andwhat to do, assign responsibilities, and set deadlines. They make meaning byorganizing are one
getting together and talking. When they understand what others think or
and the same, andbelieve, they can begin to establish what is possible and practical and what
they ought to do. “Sharing knowledge” means making meaning, always withare creative anda view to doing something.
social, framed by
Sharing knowledge is shorthand for human contacts and exchanges – collaborating,negotiating, conferring, consulting, and even squabbling andconversations.
wrangling – in groups and one-on-one. Sharing knowledge happens in meetings, on the telephone, via faxes and emails, face-to-face in corridors and offices, or online.
When they share knowledge, people generate ideas and possibilities that lead to their taking
action.2
People generate the possibilities for action in their conversations. Until they talk together,
they have only vague ideas, general views, and possibly divergent expectations. In their conversations, they transform these into meaningful sets of opportunities or possibilities andeventually into offers and products or services. Without conversations in cafeterias andoffices, in hallways and during smoke breaks, in elevators, on telephones, and by email,knowledge workers cannot express views, make commitments, learn from others, generate
new ideas, and produce things they or their clients want.
Knowledge work has the following important characteristics. Working and organizing are
one and the same, and are creative and social, framed by conversations. Both work and organizing consist of people thinking of possibilities or opportunities for action, discussing them,and doing something (e.g., pursuing a course of action). People organize as they work andvice versa. Every course of action is the result of people coming together. When they interact,they originate possibilities for action that reflect the unique circumstances (e.g. the time,
place, situation, attitudes, and perspectives) of their coming together. So, both doing andorganizing knowledge work are deeply social and creative. Every “product” is different, provided in response to someone’s unique, specific request and requirements.
To do good knowledge work – from establishing what a client wants and what a vendor
can provide, to deciding how to fulfill contractual obligations – people have to share knowledge. Providing others with access to data is a minor consideration. What really matters are
their ideas, points of view, and beliefs. People “invent,” or originate, opportunities for action
because they come together and share their ideas, beliefs, and points of view. How well they
do this depends on how, and how fully, they are able to engage each other in conversations.
If conversations are the seeds of knowledge work, the soil for those conversations is

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“aligning.” People align when they interact. Aligning is a metaphor for forming relationships
in a way that enables people to share knowledge and do their work effectively. Aligning also
describes people’s attitudes, including their intentions toward one another. Their attitudes
matter, because they affect their working relationships and the quality of their work. For
example, people’s abilities to be open, responsive, and frank, as opposed to secretive, uncooperative, and devious, will make an enormous difference in whether or not they can work
together effectively. In the absence of aligning, there are organizational “breakdowns” suchas unfulfilled commitments, and – put bluntly – bad work.
The “dirty secret” of knowledge organizations is their many unpublicized breakdowns. A
prime example of these is expensive projects that fail, with nothing to show for the millionsof dollars that may have been spent. Too-familiar versions of these breakdowns include:• Time and again we hear that, after installation, a client could not use software that
had taken months or years to develop. Because it was badly designed, it did not dowhat the client expected and required.3• It can take years to bring an organization “up to speed” after installing a large-scale
enterprise integration system. During that time, simple activities like printing reports
may be extremely cumbersome. Employees become frustrated at having to change theway they do things because “that is what the system requires.”• A local government abandoned a project for restructuring its revenue collection after
three years of work and countless hours of consultants’ time because it was clear thatthey were not getting what they had specified in the contract.
• After money had been earmarked, a government project for reforestation was shelved
because people living in the area, who had claims to the land, were overlooked in theimpact study that dealt mainly with the physical ecology of the area.
• Nonprofit organizations undertake development projects that promise a great deal but
deliver little, especially to people living in dire poverty. A tiny fraction of the vast costof those projects could potentially bring enormous benefit to such people, but thousands of miles, different interests, and many “layers” of different organizations
separate their lives from those of the project teams and administrators.
Project managers and consultants blame these problems on poor communication, fragmentation, or inadequate information, but their efforts to put things right are often unsuccessful. In the vignette that began this article, Linda Nessman, facing the issue offragmentation, asks rhetorically, “Something is missing. What can’t we see?” The answer is,“the realization that people cannot work without sharing knowledge, and they cannot shareknowledge without aligning.”
If Linda could see herself doing her work, she would recognize the irony that, as a knowledge worker, very little she does depends on the formal structures, processes, and directives
designed and mandated by management to make the organization efficient. She just ignores
them because they are largely irrelevant and, if she didn’t, those systems would actually getin her way. Steeped in the ideology of her management training, she doesn’t see the incongruity between the way she and her colleagues work, and the systems and structures she thinks
are necessary. But, by describing how her team went about their work, we can learn a gooddeal about organizing knowledge work.

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Feature n Addleson, Brumburgh, Chawla 29

The work of Linda’s teamA group of people, handpicked for their experience and ideas, began by talking. At their firstmeeting they had nothing more than a table and chairs; writing pads, pens, and paper; asomewhat ambiguous request from Chuck, Linda’s boss, to “get people out of their silos”; aflipchart and markers; a large pot of coffee; and a box of doughnuts. From then on, wheneverthey met and talked, they gave direction and substance to an evolving project, inventing andcrafting their work, and devising a plan for reorganization along the way. Beginning with
their discussion of Chuck’s request, everything they did emerged as they talked, met, reflected, and interacted with various people inside and outside the organization. Conversations
largely are their work (see Winograd 1987).
Everyone they spoke to and everything they did involved making meaning: establishingwhat they ought to do and reaching agreement on how to do it. To produce a suitable strategy they needed to “come up with ideas” about how to deal with fragmentation; “understandthe problem” by making sense of what is going on; “see new possibilities” in terms of steps
that could be taken to solve it; “get buy-in” from various stakeholder groups; “gain the confidence” of particular individuals and of each other; and “find a solution” that would meetthe needs of the company and serve the disparate interests of different people.
The entire project was fluid, dynamic, and emergent. Nothing was predetermined. Eachconversation or meeting influenced how they conceived their task, where they put their energies, and what eventually they would include in their proposal for reorganization. Knowledge
work is “making meaning as you go” and “learning as you go.” That is very different fromthe way people usually think about work when they talk about “job descriptions,” “performance,” and “training.” These concepts belong in old-style factories where work is routine,
repetitive, and measurable, and depends more on specific physical skills than on reasoning,ideas, judgment, and experience.
Members of the team continually shared knowledge – with each other, across the organization, and beyond it – until they declared the work they were doing together (e.g., the project)complete. By sharing knowledge, people continually envisage, create, and enact the possibilities for action. That is how they define, organize, and do their work.

Structure in Relationships
Linda’s team at work provides a picture that could hardly be more different from the way
most people think of an organization. If we were to sketch it, it might look something like
Figure 2.
This is a view of organizing. Contrast it with Figure 1, which gives the impression thatan organization is orderly, stable, and solid. Here, however, everything is ephemeral anddisjointed, or fragmented. Figure 2 suggests disorganization, even chaos. How can managers possibly control this? What are they supposed to coordinate? When managers ask thesequestions, they generally do not get answers. It is important to appreciate that, because
we are dealing with knowledge work, such questions are misleading and largely irrelevant.
Knowledge work does not fit a definite structure or well-defined boundaries. The wholeprocess of organizing is “emergent.” People organize by talking to one another. One set of
conversations leads to others, with different participants, new relationships, and new issues,
perspectives, and ideas. The questions to ask are: “Are people willing and able to cooperate?
How are they aligning?”

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Figure 2 is really about relationships.
Figure 2: Linda’s Team at Work
Relationships are the “structure” for organizing knowledge work (see Schrage 1995, 148),
but are invisible. If we try to show relationships among the people planning the reorganization – most of whom are not members ofLinda’s team – we end up identifying a few
connections in “networks.” Those are not thesame as relationships. Social networks(Lipnack and Stamps 1994; Cross and Parker
2004) identify who interacts with whom.
Relationships are about people’s attitudes andabout their feelings toward one another: duty,
responsibility, confidence, commitment, trust,reliance, accountability, and even love (or theabsence of these, such as distrust, lack of confidence, irresponsibility). How can these be
drawn [ in two dimensions on a piece of paper]?
Even though relationships cannot be measured or shown on a chart, people know that they
are vital for getting their work done. Their relationships influence their ability to do theirwork and the quality of their work. Relationships are the essence of humanity and the basisof people’s ability to organize.4 Their relationships are probably more real to people than “theorganization” itself (Spretnak 1998).

Organizations Discourage Cooperation
If organizations bring people together to work together, why is cooperation so difficult andfragmentation so common? One reason is that cooperation was hardly an issue on old-style
production lines, where today’s principles of management originated. Unfortunately, thoseprinciples are still in effect in most organizations where top management attempts to control
the entire organization like a machine. To regulate costs, revenues, and profits, managers
focus on measuring things and making adjustments based on the results. People are parts ofthe machine. The mindset is “observe, record, and monitor individual performances to ensure
they are productive.” What matters are how many hours workers bill, how many forms they
process, how many customers they contact, how many lines of code they write, and so on.
There isn’t a need for relationships if conversations are “idle chatter” that wastes time.
To understand this point of view, we revisit the ideas of the French mathematician-philosopher René Descartes, whose writing in the first half of the seventeenth century wasseminal to the thinking and discourse of the “Enlightenment. He and some of his contemporaries saw the separation of scholarship and science from theology as a way of freeing scientist-scholars from the hegemony of Catholic Church teachings. His method of effecting that
separation was to articulate a philosophy that argued for the separation of mind and body.
His ideas contributed to a major schism in Western thought – between subjective beliefs (e.g.,
feelings, perceptions, ideologies) and objective science (e.g., data, observations, facts) – thatexerts a powerful influence on Western attitudes. That “split” explains why organizations
shun the “personal” and “social” aspects of life and why it is so difficult to change this.
The Cartesian split separated knowledge into two domains: the mind, the domain of rea-reflections.solonline.org

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son, including physical entities that can be measured and studied using the methods ofempirical science; and the body, the domain of heart and religion, or spirit, including phenomena such as feelings and relationships, which are not amenable to empirical testing. Overtime, in the West, one component of this split came to dominate the way scholars think.
Scientific knowledge came to be seen as “objective” and valued as truth, while knowledge assoFigure 3: The Cartesian Split
ciated with the body, including feelings, beliefs,
emotions, and intuition, was scorned as unscientific and disparaged as being “subjective.”
Figure 3 presents the dualism of the
Cartesian split in a way that might help us
understand organizations and work life today.
The diagram is impressionistic. It is simply away of evoking the spirit of the Cartesian split
and is neither a description of the world nor of
Descartes’ own ideas.
“Scientific management” brought the resultsof the Cartesian split to organizations in the latenineteenth century (Kanigel 1997; Taylor, 1916).
Today, when people learn management, theylearn that only those things associated with theright-hand side belong in organizations. There is
ample evidence of this in “management speak,”the language of managerial culture. Management
speak is scientific management brought up to date: a language about strategy, outcomes,
plans, performance, competition, structure, efficiency, costs, billable hours, schedules, incentives, productivity, numbers, goals, and so on. Anyone who has worked in an organization
recognizes it.
Management speak turns organizations into mechanical systems with problems thatdemand technical solutions. There is no room for human qualities such as feelings, attitudes,
beliefs, intentions, relationships, and values. Managers learn that if something is wrong theyought to look to work-process maps and the structure (e.g., the organizational chart) for asolution (Mintzberg and Van der Heyden 1999). Here is the crux of why managers find they
are incapable of solving the problem of fragmentation. Organizing is about people interacting. People actually organize around relationships, the “white spaces” of the charts and maps
(see Figure 2). As this is invisible to management,5 organizations are not paying attention towhat matters most: how people interact and how well they share knowledge. Steeped as they
are in a language that describes the right-hand side of the Cartesian split, managers cannot
see the difficulties people have in sharing knowledge, which are a source of major breakdowns in organizations.

Why sharing knowledge is difficult
Organizing knowledge work, in which people share knowledge (i.e., interact and makemeaning together), is complex and demanding in a way that old-style factory work is not.
Organizing knowledge work is what Adam Kahane calls a “tough problem” (Kahane 2004).6
Dealing with tough problems takes able negotiators and facilitators as well as dedication and

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openness on the part of the people involved. Just figuring out what to do can be difficult
enough but, when many people are involved, the difficulties multiply. Their tasks, objectives,opportunities, and priorities shift and change as they work. And, to do their work well, meetdeadlines, and produce good results, they need to keep one another abreast of what is goingon, what they are doing, who is involved, and what their clients expect. Doing good knowledge work depends on everyone involved being committed to what theyTop-down control
are doing and accountable to each other for what they do.
Here is the fundamental paradox and tension in organizations today. has long outlived its
Organizing knowledge work requires cooperation and aligning, but management practices, which began in old-style factories, sponsor fragmenta- usefulness. Now ittion. As a result, at the start of a new project, for example, people work is an obstacle towith others (from different parts of the organization or from other orgaorganizing knowlnizations) whom they know vaguely, if at all, or with whom they may becompeting on a contract bid or for promotion. Although they must work
edge work.
together to organize, they have different technical backgrounds, different
interests, and different reporting structures, and they probably do not share expectations or
norms. Equally important, when there is a need to take action, permission to do so often
comes from a superior who knows little about what is going on beyond his own level andoutside his department, and has no intimate knowledge of the project.
What does it take to share knowledge and work together? People have to become intentional about aligning, and must encourage and honor collaboration, including supporting collaboration at an institutional level. At the very least, that means removing obstacles to build-ing
good working relationships. There are obstacles in every direction and we can now appreciate
why the Cartesian split matters so much. Managers see and talk about work through the lensof the right-hand side of the split. When it comes to understanding and removing obstacles,
their authority, responsibilities, and actions are limited to the structure of organizations,observable work processes, and measurable outcomes. Because they don’t see the “whitespaces” where people come together to organize, or the relationships that fill those spaces,
managers cannot act in ways that are appropriate to dealing with fragmentation.
Top-down control has long outlived its usefulness. Now it is an obstacle to organizing
knowledge work. The solution to fragmentation is a “dis-solution,” as Kofman and Senge
put it (Kofman and Senge, n.d.): dissolving the managerial mindset or (re)-integrating the two
halves of the split. When people can again “see” interpersonal relationships and the nuancesand complexities of people’s interactions, they can appreciate how important relationships
are in organizing, recognize the importance of the “white spaces” of organizing, and understand what goes on there. Only then do they have the capacity to organize knowledge work
effectively: to engage each other fully as human beings, share knowledge, and create possibilities together with commitment and accountability to each other.
Any discussion about dissolving managerial culture needs to come with a very large warning label: “There is no instant solution or miracle cure. Do not look for one.” The managerial mindset is gradually disappearing in organizations because as people are talking about
teams, social networks, and communities of practice, they are, in the same breath, challenging, dissecting, and undermining the status quo. In the course of time, everything people now
believe about managing will change. But this shift in worldview – from top-down management to a model that acknowledges the primacy of sense-making – is the most fundamental
change imaginable. It involves people’s identities, their sources of power, their attitudes to one

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another (which show up in their work practices), and their remuneration. Fundamental
change is neither quick nor easy. Just as we don’t expect people with positional power simply
to relinquish it, there is no reason to believe that this kind of change can or will come fromthe top, or even gain a foothold there.
Yet, while managerialism remains, that mindset limits people’s ability to work creatively
and responsibly. So how can we serve the process of change in a practical way? What can you
and I do to work together more effectively, to address the issue of accountability, to support
one another, and to tackle the problem of fragmentation that people are talking about? How
do we get from fragmentation to aligning?

Organizational Coaching and Conversations
The first thing to note is that organizational change initiatives typically take entirely thewrong approach to dealing with fragmentation. They focus on the organization (e.g., mission, vision, restructuring), on individuals (e.g., cross-cultural training), or on both. That is
because they are top-down actions, influenced by the Cartesian split. To deal with fragmentation the emphasis has to shift to where fragmentation occurs: in interactions and relationships.
No one has meaningful, organization-wide relationships, and work relationships transcend the boundaries of organizations. So, when dealing with fragmentation, the organization is irrelevant and becomes a distraction. We need to be thinking about how people
organize. Ask where and to whom fragmentation, breakdowns, and aligning matter and theanswer is working groups, such as project teams. People share knowledge relationship-byrelationship, conversation-by-conversation, group-by-group – one set of relationships andone conversation at a time.
Responding to fragmentation is a two-step process. It begins with “seeing” the causes offragmentation, which, because of the Cartesian split, are normally invisible. People can beintentional about “building” good working relationships when they treat their relationships
as central to organizing (i.e., in their teams or project groups). The second, and vitally important, piece is aligning: having the capacity to build effective relationships. These two steps
describe the purpose and process of organizational coaching.

Organizational coaching
The object of organizational coaching is to enable people first to see new possibilities foraction, especially in terms of how they work and how they work together, and then to initiate conversations that generate aligning. The only people who can change the way they work
are the ones doing the work, as they continually form the relationships that are essential toknowledge work. Organizational coaching encourages people to recognize their capacity (orpersonal power) to influence how they work, and offers a way of doing just that. As a “movement for change,” organizational coaching turns conventional thinking on its head. Change is
not the responsibility or prerogative of top management (which, in any case, is not interested
in the nitty-gritty of this or that project). The power of change lies squarely in the hands ofpeople who work and organize together.
The idea behind organizational coaching is a simple one. When people talk to one another about their relationships, about what they can expect to accomplish together, and about
what they expect from each other – conversations which they don’t usually have because

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these are not part of the managerial culture – they approach their work differently, with asense of intentionality, commitment, and accountability to one another. When they do thisregularly, when those conversations become an integral (and invisible) part of their organizing, the commitments they engender establish a participative culture. The work people dotogether is more effective, more creative, and more rewarding for them.
The practice of coaching rests on the intimate connection between what people understandor see (their “mental models’) and how they act, or between how they make meaning andwhat they do. Organizational coaching brings that connection to the activities of organizing
work, in order to address the breakdowns described as “fragmentation.”
People come to appreciate that their ways of working and their work The only people
relationships are rooted in their way of seeing things (i.e., the worldview
who can change theassociated with managerial culture) and to understand the connections
between their views, the assessments they make, and their actions. As
way they work are the“new observers,” however, with different views, new actions become
ones doing the work,
open to them – in this case, different ways of working and being togethas they continuallyer.
A coach typically works with individuals, one on one. Through their form the relationships
conversations, coach and coachee explore the latter’s views, assessments,
and actions, and discuss other ways of seeing things and hence, possibili- that are essential toties for new or different actions. An organizational coach works with a knowledge work.
group of people who themselves are working to accomplish something
together (e.g., a project team or leadership group). The coach and the group use coaching
principles and practices to explore the breakdowns in their organizing and to develop cooperative work practices that enable aligning.
In organizational coaching, there are two facets of learning. One has to do with the underpinnings of social constructionism about views (ways of seeing) and action: how what we
speak about in our conversations is tied to both what we see and what we do. The otherlearning encompasses new conversations. The object is to have a group of people who work
together engage each other in conversations that help them to align whenever they work
together.
The purpose and delight of organizational coaching are found in this: when conversations
for aligning become a habit, people continually, but largely unintentionally, become organizational coaches, coaching each other about the way they work together. When they do, they
practice aligning in their everyday interactions at work. When they engage in conversations
for aligning intentionally, talking to one another about what they are doing, asking what theywant to accomplish, discussing what problems they face, and so on, they accomplish twothings. They build relationships (and accountability, trust, and cooperation) that are essential
for doing knowledge work. They also share and “create” knowledge about the project, theirinterests, their intentions, the obstacles they are up against, and so on. In both cases, they lay
the ground for collaboration, good work, and good results. Conversations for aligning areboth means (building relationships) and ends (sharing knowledge) of doing knowledge
work.

Conversations for aligning
Each of the following is an example of a conversation that supports people’s ability to dotheir knowledge work. All are “missing” in managerial organizations.

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When they engage in conversations
around any of these 10 themes, people makemeaning together about aspects of their
Personal Power If you could move forward on your own,
work that, ordinarily, they ignore or avoid.
what would you do? What prevents you from exercising your
Each conversation produces a deeper underpersonal power?
standing of what is happening. When the
Meaning What are we supposed to be doing? What do you
conversations are part of people’s everyday
make of the client’s request? Who are the experts here whowork repertoire, the potential for aligning
can help us understand the problem?
opens the way to meaningful, productive,
Relationships I’m not happy about our commitment and I
and effective work. The conversations bring
think there is an issue of trust. Can we talk about it?
to light knowledge (about their work andPossibility What are the different options we have so far?
about the group, including people’s attiWhere do you think we will get the most leverage?
tudes and commitments) that is vital tosustaining their relationships and theirSuccess What do we need to do to declare a successful
outcome to this project? What will satisfy you?
work. The key to aligning is people recognizing that one or more conversations is
Accountability What are the consequences for each of us“missing” and subsequently engaging each
if we don’t meet the deadline? What are we going to do toother in the missing conversations.
support one another?
It is strange that people who are workPromises and Commitments What has each of us said we
ing together for the first time, or who arewill do? Let’s look at what those commitments involve.
working on a new project, in a new field,
Action We appear to have created a good framework. Now,
and with unknown challenges, do notwhat is the next step and who is going to take the leadpause, reflect, and ask questions such as thehere?
following: What are we actually supposed
Results What outcome do we want to see? Is this bottom
to be doing?” (meaning); “What does eachline reasonable? What does our customer expect?
of us (in this group) see as a successful outReflection What just happened? What did we learn? What
come of this project?” (success); or “Who isshould we do next time?
going to be responsible for each phase wehave identified and what does that responsibility entail?” (accountability). Yet, weknow all too well that people do not ask these questions. The production-line mentality discourages them from doing so.

10 Conversation for Aligning

Why organizational coaching?
“Why,” you may ask, “do people need an organizational coach to help them have conversations and share knowledge at work? Aren’t conversations a normal human activity? Is organizational coaching a thinly disguised effort to make money by creating another ‘technology’for something that is entirely natural and spontaneous?” Talking might be the quintessential
human social activity. Sadly, however, open conversations at work about work and work
relationships are anything but natural, because once organizations fell under the spell of scientism and the Cartesian split they became antihuman, antisocial, and anticonversational.
It ought to be easy for people to have conversations for aligning, but we know that they
don’t have them and almost everything about managerial culture works against their doingso. Hierarchy and bureaucracy separate people by function and position. The physical layoutof work spaces (e.g., cubicles) keeps them apart. The emphasis on “billable hours” is one
symptom of a culture in which people aren’t allowed to talk and don’t have the time to do

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so. Hyper-competition pits one person against the next, so why would they talk? People havebeen trained and ought to know what to do, so saying “I don’t know” or asking for someone’s help reveals incompetence. Asking questions wastes time and is “unproductive.” No
one dares to talk about issues – like power, trust, or accountability – that hang over theirrelationships and their work like the sword of Damocles. Yet, without those conversations,they cannot organize or do their work effectively. Is it surprising that there are fragmentation
and breakdowns?
The work of knowledge workers is in ideas and meaning. It takes collaboration and collaboration is generative. When people organize they need to allow for the emergence of new
ideas and for spontaneous action. On top of this, it takes an ever-changing cast to get thework done. That includes clients; their contacts, lawyers, and superiors; your superiors; yourown administration, IT, and marketing people; your suppliers; their designers; and so on. For
all these reasons, organizing takes time, energy, and effort. Aligning is not a goal but a reflection of people’s desire to work together effectively and creatively. That, too, takes time andenergy, for there is never an end to aligning.
Management practices constantly try, but can never succeed, in turning organizing into
something routine and even monotonous. Because the rules and regulations that underpin theculture of compliance in organizations don’t allow for the work and time that go into organizing properly, people often do a bad job. Changing that mentality is extraordinarily difficult. People look for all sorts of reasons why things “went wrong,” but they hardly ever talkabout how they work, organize, and interact with one another. Organizational coachingencourages them to do just that.
If people are willing and able to engage in new conversations, they can organize differently and do their work differently. When they do, they begin to change their workplaceculture. There is wonderful symmetry in people using conversations to change the way theywork. People need to talk to one another to organize, share knowledge, and do their work
well. So, encourage them to talk together in new conversations. If they do that whenever theycome together, they create a “learning space” with each other.
People simply cannot work without conversations, and good work requires good conversations. Conversations are the means of aligning, and much more: they are actually the context, processes, and practices for change. When people talk about the things that are missing
from their work conversations – meaning, success, possibilities, relationships, results –together they become the change. They build relationships based on commitment, accountability, and trust. Then, possibilities that were not available before – including ways ofworking and new perspectives on what they are doing – become open to them.

Endnotes
1

Other authors write about “fragmentation” and “alignment.” They include Block (1993), Conklin (undated), and Kofman and Senge (undated), who speak about ‘fragmentation,’ and Wenger (1998),
who talks about ‘alignment.’

2

The work of John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid explores knowledge-creation as a social process.
See, for example, Brown and Duguid (1991, 2000).

3

For a fine example, see “New FBI Software May be Unusable,” Los Angeles Times, January 13 available
at: http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-na-fbi13jan13,1,4910746.story?ctrack= 3&cset=truereflections.solonline.org

Feature n Addleson, Brumburgh, Chawla 37

4

There is an expression in the Inguni languages of South Africa known by the contraction ubuntu,
which speaks to the socialness (i.e., relational nature) of human existence. The phrase means “people
are people through other people.”

5

The socialness of organizing is central to Etienne Wenger’s work on “communities of practice”(Wenger, 1998) and is essential for understanding why organizing is in the “white spaces” of organization charts, invisible to standard management practices.

6

In a classic article, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973) draw a distinction between “wicked” and“tame” problems. The latter are mainly technical and have clear-cut solutions, while wicked problems are problems of meaning. Using their terminology, all the problems of knowledge work arewicked, though the tools and techniques of management are designed for tame problems.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The authors are consultants, teachers, and coaches who have many years of experience in and withbusinesses, government, and nonprofits, both in the U.S and abroad. Hailing from South Africa, Mark
Addleson is on the faculty of George Mason University, where he directed the Organizational Learning
Masters program for a decade. Scott Brumburgh is an OD consultant and master coach whose worktakes him to Africa and the Middle East. He worked in government in environmental management for
many years. Raj Chawla has also worked in government, and is now a consultant and certified coachwith a particular interest in coalition building and organizational transformation. He is active in community work and regularly works on the Indian subcontinent. Kindly address correspondence to Mark
Addleson.
maddleso@gmu.edu

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Feature n Addleson, Brumburgh, Chawla 39

The Connected Company
Peter Gumpert

In 1997 Arie de Geus1 published a set of case studies
describing the characteristics of some 40 companies
that had prospered for 200
years or more. He contrasted them with the majorityof large companies worldPeter Gumpert
wide, which tended to havea far shorter life span – 40 years or fewer. In 1996
the New York Stock Exchange celebrated its 100thbirthday. Only one of its listed companies (General
Electric) had survived as long.
The first characteristic described by de Geus isthat long-lived companies are sensitive to their environments; despite obstacles, such as slow means ofcommunication, they have remained aware of and inharmony with the world around them. The second
characteristic of these companies is that they areinternally cohesive, with a strong sense of identity.
No matter how diversified they are, their employees– and even their suppliers in some cases – feel they
are part of one entity, one community.
Companies that are 200 years old or more havesurvived enormous changes: political, economic,
technological, demographic, leadership, and market
fluctuations. Such transitions now occur more rapidly and are felt much sooner than was the case in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – and they
may be even more difficult to predict or manage. We
live in an era of accelerated change and complexity,
sometimes verging on chaos.
How can today’s companies survive and prosper
in such challenging times? I believe that, like deGeus’s long-lived companies, today’s companies survive in part through their connectedness – through40 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

strong internal connections and trusted relationships
with customers, suppliers, business allies, and people
in the broader community. 2
Connectedness is a property of the relationshipsthat exist between coworkers inside an organization,
including relationships with cooperators outside.
The term also refers to the organizations in whichthese relationships exist. At the individual relationship level, connectedness refers to the degree towhich people engage in exchanges of information,ideas, influence, and approaches to their work. At
the organizational level, connectedness refers to thedegree of idea and influence exchange available inindividual relationships, and the proportion of relationships in which connected exchanges occur.
Connected organizations receive support internally and from their environments. The benefits ofthis support include:• Earlier identification of challenges. Companies
with strong external as well as internal connections have the means to see problems sooner, andmay therefore have more time to prepare for themand/or adapt to them.
• Broader bases for making and implementing decisions. Detecting and understanding marketplacechanges, for example, can require a broad set of“sensors” both within the company and without.
Likewise, reliable feedback about the effects ofpolicy decisions is valuable.
• Innovation. A clear understanding of customer
needs, wishes, and problems helps set company
goals. In software companies, for example, there
is a recurring conflict between forces that favor
dedicating resources to the next release of anreflections.solonline.org

older product and forces that favor developmentof a broader, novel technology.
• Timely availability of resources. There are times
when sympathetic assistance from banks andextensions of credit by suppliers are needed; likewise, customer loyalty is particularly importantwhen a product is commoditized and price competition escalates.
Thus connectedness can lead to improvements inboth agile adaptation to change and resilience whenenvironmental changes present unusual challenges
and difficulties.
Some local businesses in smaller communities
become involved in community affairs. Their owners
serve on town committees, contribute to educationand the arts, and take other actions that involve
them in the community. These actions are frequently
explained as indirect attempts to market, gain visibility, curry favor, obtain influence, and the like.
While such “exchange” motives may be involved,
they tell far less than the whole story. The small
town and its businesses are interdependent, andoften act on that recognition. Each preserves theother. In the same way, the members of these businesses are involved in each others’ lives, and often
help and support one another during difficult periods.
The relationships among people within a company, and between the company and significant stakeholders, should be considered an important company
asset, independent of the individuals involved. If we
could obtain indicators of the degree of connectedness of a company, both internally and with its external environment, the indicators would be strong
predictors of the company’s adaptability, effectiveness, and long-term viability.
The related idea of “social capital” has been
examined on a larger scale by sociologists, economists, and administrators of social policy.3 This
notion of social capital refers to the measurable
value created by social networks, and the inclinations that these networks generate for people to do
things for each other. The term suggests that a variety of quite specific benefits flow from the trust,reflections.solonline.org

reciprocity, information, and cooperation associatedwith social networks. Social capital works throughinformation flows, norms of reciprocity (mutualaid), bonding networks that connect people who aresimilar, and bridging and linking networks that connect individuals and groups diverse in geography,
interests, and other characteristics. The 2002 reporton social connectedness by the New Zealand
Ministry of Social Development4 suggests that social
connectedness in communities is associated withhigher income, better health, greater educational
achievements, and longevity. In general, the reportsuggests, the more linkages the better, two-way relationships are better than one-way relationships, andlinkages that are regularly updated are better thanthose that are only historically embedded.5
Connectedness has also been discussed on a
global level. Thomas P.M. Barnett’s work, for example, emphasizes the opportunity costs and othermajor costs associated with the existence of a set of
nations throughout the world that are more or lessdisconnected from the “functioning core” of nations
that are actively integrating their economies into a
global economy.6

What Inhibits Connectedness
in Companies?
Many larger businesses do not recognize their interdependence with their social environments and act as
if they function in isolation. What accounts for this?

The Effect of Broad Cultural Values
American culture, and perhaps American male culture in particular7, values individual responsibility,
independence, and individual action, and is reluctant
to acknowledge the positive aspects of dependency
or interdependence. The success of a business or
project tends to be attributed to its most visible
leader. The working groups of people that actuallyaccomplish tasks are seldom recognized (except inspeeches by an appropriately humble executive).
People speak as if the president of the country is

EKF ■ Gumpert 41

responsible for the nation’s decisions, judgments,
actions, and outcomes. Even the success of sports
teams is often attributed to their star performers. If
something does not go well, we try first to look forthe particular person responsible for the failure. We
seldom even wonder about the human system that isalways involved; that issue will be discussed further
later in this article.
Our culture also tends to assume that people are
motivated by individual rewards, mainly material
ones such as personal advancement in status, wealth,security, benefits, or power. Except in family relationships, we tend to be skeptical and suspicious of
the “softer” motives and principles of distributive
justice (such as the equality or caring principles).8
A particular aspect of Darwin’s early theory of
evolution has also caught on as a social truism: his
doctrine of “natural selection” or “survival of the fittest” has often been used as if it were a scientific justification for the individualist and competitive values
we tacitly or explicitly accept as normal and desirable. This notion (which has been challenged bymodern evolutionary scientists)9 fits with both nineteenth century Calvinism and the traditional American value system, assigning virtue to individual“winners” and those who accumulate wealth – andfundamental inferiority to “losers.” The most valued
businesses, like the most valued sports teams, arethose that win through sheer strength, and defeat
their competition.
Our larger companies are widely dispersed, andmay not particularly identify with a single place. It
may be hard for them to recognize the aspects of theenvironment with which they are interdependent.
Larger, more geographically distributed companies
often speak the language of “social responsibility”
and act as if they were isolated from others, as if they
do not depend on them. In some cases, companies
treat their end-use customers and suppliers with suspicion, arrogance, or even contempt.
Thus some larger companies act as if people(employees, customers, suppliers) are replaceablecommodities. In one company familiar to us, employees are informally referred to as “heads,” which

42 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

can be “cut” as needed to manage near-term costs.
Decision makers do not fully recognize that every
time they lay off an employee they disrupt a numberof relationships, lose knowledge and experience, andincur the hidden and often substantial costs involvedin the downstream replacement of that person. It
takes time and effort to train, build new relationships, establish trust, and recreate lost synergy.
Similarly, it is usually much more expensive toreplace a lost customer than to keep an old one.

What External Pressures Prevent
Connectedness?
The demands of securities markets. Many larger
companies have accepted two ideas. First, they
accept the idea that they must continually growin size and revenue or risk being consumed or relegated to a backwater role. Second, they accept thenotion that quarterly profit figures can determine thecompany’s fate in the securities marketplace. These
ideas, which come from stock market analysts andbrokers, are internalized by companies and havestrong consequences: constant worry about thecompany’s growth path, and constant worry about
profit-related performance. Thus companies try theirbest to manage these factors, and pay less attention
to maintaining and strengthening the relationshipsthat really contribute to their long term viability.
These pressures exert particular force on thecompany’s executive team – the people who occupy“C” positions (Chief Operating Officer, Chief
Executive Officer, et al.). People in those positions
feel keen personal accountability for what they thinkof as important results, often acting as if profit andgrowth are more important than product/service success, market share, or other aspects of the longerterm future. Since they worry about being blamed
for what the market considers failures, they can
become tightly focused on financials, which amounts
to steering the boat by watching its wake.10 Relationships and long-term viability are not a primary
focus if your job is on the line this very quarter.
The internal consequences of such external pres-reflections.solonline.org

sures are more subtle, and hard to recognize. The insidious problem of managing
for the short term and under-attending tolong-term viability can be exacerbated byshort-term success. If a company succeeds
in increasing its revenue/profit for several
quarters, its executives are more likely tocontinue using the methods they see as
having led to their successes. As one
example, the business process re-engineering movement of the late 1980s andearly 1990s was often used primarily to
lower personnel costs, and led many companies into unanticipated difficulty.
Electronic communication and thespan of attention. One of the unintended
consequences of rapid electronic communication methods is that people in organizations are often overwhelmed by thesheer volume of what they are asked toattend to. Executives and others complain
about the extraordinary amount of time
it takes to manage or even cope with thedozens or hundreds of communications
and demands for response they receive
each day, and by the staggering amountof information they are exposed to. They
are forced to manage priorities carefully,
dealing first with urgent matters; problems that may have long-term consequences are easier to push out of awareness. Little wonder that thecompany’s internal or external connectedness is nothigh on the priority list.
Impersonal electronic devices as substitutes for
direct connection. Johnson and Bröms (see above)
showed a remarkable contrast between the Toyota
manufacturing system, which relies heavily on directcommunication among production workers, andAmerican automobile production systems, which
tend to use elaborate “information factories” such as
MRP systems to make decisions about the timing of
manufacturing processes. MRP and ERP systems
have had many difficulties (such as people working
hard to get around them), and they also have thereflections.solonline.org

unintended consequence of cutting workers off fromdirect contact with one another. People who work
together, talk together, and solve problems together
often invent and maintain better ways of doing things.

How Internal Pressures Are Involved
Organizational “stovepipes.” In the quest forfunctional efficiency, companies often drift toward
creating functional groups that act as if they wereorganizational “stovepipes” or “silos” with poor orminimal connections with one another. Employees insuch stovepipes are encouraged to focus their attention primarily or exclusively on the task of theirgroup. Often they are also implicitly encouraged torestrict their communication to people in their own

EKF ■ Gumpert 43

departments, leaving cross-departmental communication to senior managers. In some cases, these silos
protect the reputations and the internal fiefdomsof their managers; the people in them are enjoinedfrom sharing with “outsiders” what their problems
or difficulties might be. Each group can then blame
others for problems, which may provoke defensive
or retaliatory responses and the further tighteningof each group’s borders.
Restricting communication tasks to particularpeople. Communication with suppliers, customers,
or others outside the organization may be restricted
to people whose explicit responsibility includes
working with those groups. Customers become theexclusive province of sales, marketing, and customer
service people; suppliers are the province of materials management, purchasing, or the occasional engineer. There are many examples in manufacturing ofproduction workers who experience problems withinternally-made parts that don’t work properly forthem. They are instructed to take the problem to asupervisor, who takes it to a superintendent, who
communicates with the supplier’s superintendent,
who communicates with the supplier’s supervisor;
that person may find fault with production workers
who may have made an error or misunderstoodrequirements. Communication is often distorted,and undermines trust. People do whatever they can
to avoid blame, and the original problem can take along time to correct. In contrast, when line workers
are encouraged to make direct connections with
their supplier counterparts, problems are resolved
more effectively, with attendant cost reductions.
The difficulties involved in systems thinking. As
mentioned earlier, many people are prone to making
what social psychologists call “the fundamental
attributional error.”11 We tend to attribute motivation, progress, success, failure, etc. to the stablepersonal characteristics of individual persons. In
most cases, an understanding of the systemic forces
and counter-forces that may be involved is a far better predictor of events; the social system tends tohave stronger and more durable impact on the direction of events than does any individual actor.12

44 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

Systems thinking takes into account complex and
uncertain social forces that are often not directly visible, so systems thinking is not natural to or comfortable for many people. It is easier to assume that
“Frank behaved that way because that’s the kind of
person he is” than to consider the many forces that
may have been acting on Frank when he decided totake the action in question. Many people seem prone
to assuming that the CEO is the cause of major company events or trends. It is far more difficult to figureout the interactive contributions of various parts ofthe system and its environment. The less visible
executives in the leadership group, the architects of
new technologies and products, the managers who
coordinate people’s efforts, the line workers responsible for product or service quality, and the culture of
the company are all integral, and often ignored.
The tendency to undervalue collaboration. We
tend to ignore or undervalue collaboration as asource of innovation and effectiveness, and areinclined to settle for simple coordination of effort,or basic cooperation. James Watson and Francis
Crick, the biologists who in 1951 proposed the“double helix” model of DNA, have both agreed
that neither could have solved this difficult, resistantproblem without the other; their collaboration was
critical to the achievement.13 Indeed, many difficult
problems are solved through collaboration, which
requires agreed-to goals, focused attention on anagreed-to problem, repeated, persistent communication, and mutual trust and respect – in short, theconnections among people that truly makes thewhole greater than the sum of its parts.

Toward Measures ofConnectedness
Connectedness between particular people can beviewed as a matter of degree. One could, for example, define the connective bandwidth between any
two people as wider when more of the following
components are included:
1. The availability and use of bi-directional communication, such as email or phone messages con-reflections.solonline.org

taining useful information. Routine “broadcast”
informational email or newsletters from managers or
executives to employees, while useful, probably should
be weighted very lightly as indicators of connectedness. It may also be useful to distinguish between
people who are primarily users of information andthose who also contribute.
2. Availability and use of face-to-face communication between people (informal or formal meetings,
video conferencing, etc.).
3. A history of truthful, unguarded informationand knowledge transfer between people in responseto needs or requests.
4. Evident willingness to persuade the other andto genuinely consider conflicting opinions and perspectives – evidence of dialogue.
5. Expressed willingness to work together on a
problem or to provide support.
6. High perceived value of the connection to theperson.
The order of these indicators of connective bandwidth moves from lower to higher degrees of connection; people whose connections with others include
the latter indicators also make use of the earlier onesin the list. A system of weights would have to bedevised, therefore, to evaluate the bandwidth of aparticular relationship, with numbers 3 through 6
having higher weight. Indicators 3 through 6 above

Table 1: Example of a Sociometric Measure of Connectedness Bandwidth
You have been selected by a random process to participate in a study of the connections we make inside our company andbeyond its borders. The tables that follow ask you to help us by writing down the names of people with whom you are incontact, and the characteristics of that contact.
In the first column, please write the names of 1-10 people inside your own department or project, and 1-10 people inside yourcompany but outside your department or project, that you communicate with. For each contact, answer the questions in thecolumns to the right of the name. For the questions that require a rating, please use the following scale:
1=seldom; 2=occasionally; 3=sometimes; 4=frequently.
People inside our company with whom you communicate:

Person’s NameIs this person in mydepartment
or projector outside
it? Ifoutside,where ishe or shelocated?

reflections.solonline.org

Does
one of us
report to
the other?

Do wecommunicate backand forthby email orvoicemail?

Do wetalk face
to face inmeetings,
and/orinformaloccasions?

Do we ask
each otherfor – andprovide –knowledge
and/orusefulinformation?

Do weexchangeviews in acontext ofmutualrespect?

Do wework onproblems
together,or provide
support or
help toeach other?

How often
do thinkof thisconnection
as valuable
to you?

Yes(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

No

EKF ■ Gumpert 45

Table 1: Example of a Sociometric Measure of Connectedness Bandwidth (CONTINUED)
People outside our company with whom you communicate:
Please name 1-10 people outside our company that you communicate with about matters of concern to our company. Write
Table
1: Example of a Sociometric Measure of Connectedness Bandwidth (CONTINUED)

the names in Column 1, and answer the questions in each column for each contact. For the questions that require a rating,please use the following scale:
You have been selected by a random process to participate in a study of the connections we make inside our company and1 = seldom;
2=occasionally;
4=frequently
beyondits borders.
The tables 3=sometimes;that follow ask you
to help us by writing down the names of people with whom you are incontact, and the characteristics of that contact.
Person’s NameIs this
Do we
Do we talkDo we ask
Do we
Do we
How often
In the first column, pleasewriteof 1-10 people
your own
or project, and 1-10
insidepersona the names
communifaceinsidetoeachdepartment
otherexchange
work peopleon
do your
think
company but outside yourdepartment cateor project,
with.
For each views
contact,
the questions inofthecustomer,back that you
facecommunicate
in
for
– and
in answer problems
this
supplier,andquestions
forth
meetings,
providea following
context scale:together,connection
columns to the right ofathe
name. For thethatrequire a rating,please– use thein an alliedby email or
and/orknowledgeof mutualor provide
as valuable
company,
voicemail?
informaland/orrespect?
support/to you?
or inoccasions?
usefulhelp toanother
informaeach other?
role?
tion?
(pleasespecify)(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

are not easily counted; they are likely to require subjective measures (Table 1 provides a sociometricexample).
The bandwidth required for a particular connection among people to be successful over time depends
on the purpose of the connection. Tasks that involve
coordination of effort or simple problem solving, forexample, may require less bandwidth than tasks that
require substantial innovation.
The density of connectedness within and acrossorganizational boundaries and with external stakeholders is a function of the number of people whoare connected in the ways described above, witheach connection at least roughly weighted. People
inside an organization can be connected by reporting
relationships, geography, function, professional discipline, joint responsibility for a project or outcome,46 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

(rating 1–4)

the need to obtain information about or deal withlocal or broader problems, and the need for supportin times of difficulty or unusual stress. Density thattranscends traditional hierarchy and propinquity isparticularly worth measuring.
The degree of connectedness can be defined as a
joint function of density and bandwidth. It can beroughly measured both inside the organization’sboundaries and beyond them, through worker surveys, examination of bidirectional communicationand influence patterns, and the like (Table 1).
Separate indexes of connectedness would have to be
developed for each significant internal group, andeach important external stakeholder group.
If it is true that connectedness leads to more successful adaptation to change and thus to longer-term
survival, it becomes particularly important to under-reflections.solonline.org

stand it, make serious attempts to measure it, relate
it to outcome variables, and encourage it. Indexes ofinternal and external connectedness in a project,department, or functional group can be related toachievement of the goals of the group; indexes ofcompany connectedness can be related to achievement of measurable company goals. It is possiblethat one major function of future senior executives
will be to understand and promote both internal andcross-boundary connectedness as an important company asset.

How to Become More Fully
Connected
I have argued that connectedness should be thoughtof as an important potential asset of a company. In
many companies, this potential is untapped, and istherefore virtually invisible. We must pay attention,
therefore, not only to measurement, but to methodsof identifying these potential assets, and strengthening the important connections inside the company
and beyond its boundaries.
Each company must determine what areas of connectedness are important to its future, and the extent
to which additional emphasis should be given toeach area. Figure 1 suggests a beginning approach tothis question, using Treacy and Wiersema’s distinction among the central “value disciplines” adopted
by companies.14 Some companies choose to emphasize product leadership (best product), some empha-

size operational excellence (low cost), and somedepend on customer intimacy for their success (providing deep understanding and total solutions totheir customers). The connectedness emphasis thatshould be considered by companies in each category
is suggested in Figure 1. Operational efficiency andproduct leadership companies, for example, may beparticularly dependent on suppliers, and wouldemphasize connectedness with them. Companies
that depend on customer intimacy must establish agreater degree of connectedness with customers thancompanies in the other two categories. Figure 1 alsosuggests that companies in each category would
profit from high internal connectedness, both within
and between departments. While the purpose of
establishing strong internal connectedness varies
across company types, the importance of internal
connectedness is high in all companies.

General Principles
Most of the time, building and maintaining connectedness requires attention to the same set of tasks:• Demonstrations of competence and reliability(non-competent or unreliable cooperators are notparticularly desirable);• Development and maintenance of trust, through— Open, lively, consistently truthful bidirectional communication— Mutual understanding of needs and operating
methods

Figure 1: Connectedness Emphasis in Three Company Types
Company type
Connectedness

Operational Efficiency
Companies

Product Leadership
Companies

Customer Intimacy
Companies

Internal (within department/project

High

High

High

Internal (cross-department/project)

High

High

High

Customers

Lower

ModerateHigh

AlliesLower

Moderate

Moderate

Suppliers

High

High

Moderatereflections.solonline.org

EKF ■ Gumpert 47

— Accepting accountability, and keeping
agreements— Sensitivity to common interests and common
values;— Readiness to respond to the others’ expressedneeds;• Productive management of conflicts of interest;• Keeping track of and recognizing collaborative
successes and mutual benefits.
Relationships involving trust are, at the beginning, highly personal, and always begin with two (ora few) people. As they become stronger, they can beextended to include others and eventually transcend
the movement of the particular individuals involvedin creating them. Their initial creation, however,requires substantial interpersonal sensitivity andskill, and careful attention to the factors listed
above.
Connected relationships require periodic maintenance – a certain amount of care and feeding. Allsuch relationships are best considered fragile, particularly during difficult or changing times. Responsibility for them should be distributed to people atvarious organizational levels, and should not be theexclusive province of a few designated people, or a
few executives and managers.

The importance of starting withinternal connectedness, and theconcept of “parallel process”
Companies that are only sparsely connected internally have greater difficulty creating and maintaining
external connectedness. If people in the company are
under-connected with others inside their own boundaries, they will be less likely to connect with people
across those boundaries. If people don’t know how,or are constrained from, relying on people acrossdepartmental or project boundaries inside theirown organization, they will have greater difficulty
creating and maintaining connections with people
and groups outside the organization. This idea is

48 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

an extension of the organizational principle of “isomorphism,” which some people refer to as “parallel
process.” As applied to organizations, the principleroughly states that an interpersonal process that typically goes on in one part of an organization is also
likely to be seen in other parts of the organization.
Apart from this assumption about the relationship between internal connectedness and connectedness with extra-organizational stakeholders, whyshould we improve connectedness inside the organization?
• Knowledge transfer is far more effective when it
involves personal contact, even if there are electronic means for knowledge transfer. Being able tocall an experienced person and talk with her or
him about the specifics of a situation is likely to
be enormously helpful in deciding on the applicability of the more abstract knowledge that might
have been stored in a knowledge management
database.
• If people in the organization don’t connect with
one another, they don’t find out what the others
know, and what they know how to do. Thus company resources remain untapped and underutilized.
• Fresh eyes on a difficult problem can be important to developing a useful solution. Likewise,
innovation and invention are facilitated by collaborative work. Collaboration and dialogue, theart of active inquiry, can provide important keys
to success; collaborators in the company often
learn much from each other.
• Many problems and tasks extend across organizational boundaries. An IT department that is trying
to develop new or improved information systems,
for example, must rely on its internal customers
to provide information and expertise about theneeds and requirements of each department.
Often the departmental managers know lessabout what’s needed than the people who workwith the older systems on a daily basis.

reflections.solonline.org

• Decisions about how to design and build a new
product or service should include input frombuilders, users, people close to the customer community, etc.
• It is important to keep abreast of events outside
the company. Employees provide many eyes andears that can help everyone detect emerging
change and enhance the company’s fund of
peripheral vision.
The company can enhance its internal connectedness by providing structures that facilitate it, and by
advocating for it. The strengthening of internal connectedness is most effectively begun at the top of thecompany, emphasizing dialogue and genuine collaboration. If executives demonstrate in a public waythat they can and do work collaboratively together,
their subordinates will get the message. Further,
executives who learn to value genuine collaborationin their work with each other are more likely to create connectedness below them, such as by forming
cross-functional groups and holding the groups
accountable for the cross-departmental goals that
employees can contribute to. Employees at all levels
can also be brought together in other ways – throughinterest groups, educational forums, professional
discussion groups, and peer consultation groups. A
company working on a number of demanding systems engineering projects found that staff members
in each project group were isolated from staff members in other, related groups. The company established an engineering council of senior engineers
who could act in a consulting capacity to projectengineers facing either local problems or issues thatwere likely to require a broad view. Project staff
members were encouraged to bring their concernsand suggested solutions to the council for discussion.
A database of problems and solutions was created,
and an agenda for each weekly council meeting was
widely published. The council was exceptionally successful as an integrative device and as a connector of
people to one another. The company responded byenlarging the council’s scope to include work thatwas being done for all of its customers.

reflections.solonline.org

Connecting with the Customer
Community
The question of who in the company should establish connections with the company’s customers is
an interesting one. A manufacturing company, forexample, may have several “levels” of customers:
wholesalers, retailers or dealers, repair facilities, and
end-users. Each group is important to the manufacturer in a different way. The end user provides
invaluable information about needs and desires,
satisfaction and potential problems, durability of the
product, and other matters of great interest. The end
user’s loyalty is to the product and its manufacturer– provided the product is properly supported andmaintained. If the end-user customer is satisfied withthe product and service or support, the retailer isstrengthened. If the retailer is well-supported by thewholesaler and the service network, the wholesaler
is more stable. If the end-use customer is well-supported by the retailer, the entire system is strengthened. So it is in the best interests of all concerned tostrengthen the network of connections involved. It
may be important for some people in the manufacturing company itself (such as engineers, designers,
and even line workers) to have direct connection
with end users and to avoid relying entirely on theinformation provided by retailers.
The immediate customers of the publisher of afictional high-end home magazine include both its
readers and its advertisers. One of the functions of
the magazine is to connect the community of highend home buyers and owners with the architects,
contractors, designers, furniture makers, and artists
they may decide to employ. The publishing company
could think of itself as a connector between two
communities that may have difficulty reaching one
another. The magazine’s designers and writers could
learn about the needs and capabilities of advertisers
by accompanying salespeople on sales calls. The
company could hold informative seminars andworkshops (without a sales agenda) for homeowners
and homebuyers. Such events lead the publisher’s
staff to understand more about, and be more respon-

EKF ■ Gumpert 49

sive to, the needs of the magazine’s buyers.
Service companies tend to do better when theyremain in close connection with their customers16,
and find ways of contributing actively to their customers’ success. The MITRE Corporation, forexample, is a public service corporation that operates Federally Funded Research and Development
Centers (FFRDCs), which are created to provide
technical assistance to sponsoring government agencies. MITRE works explicitly to move toward andmaintain “mission partnership” relationships with
its government sponsors; MITRE measures its success in terms of its impact on its sponsors’ success,and in terms of the state of its relationships withsponsors. Likewise certain retailers, such as L. L.
Bean and the Container Company have developed astrong and valuable reputation for an unusual levelof support to customers.

Connecting with Businesses –Allies and Potential Adversaries
Companies building strategic alliances with othercompanies can build connectedness between themselves and their allies at several organizational levels.
Their connections are strengthened to the extent thatthey emphasize their common goals, share important
knowledge, engage in joint problem-solving, communicate often and thoroughly, and so on. Such efforts
can include short-duration employee exchanges that
result in both parties having more intimate knowledge of each other’s culture and capabilities.
Alliances that include conflicting goals. Sometimes
companies create alliances that involve conflicts ofinterest as well as some goals in common, such as in
the joint work that competing software companies
choose to do to develop standards that improve theinteroperability of their products. Allies can build amutual understanding of the potential areas of conflict, and can devise productive ways to manage
those conflicts. One example that comes to mind
does not involve business alliances in the usual senseof the term. The MITRE Corporation often assists
government agencies with the acquisition of newcapabilities in which commercial contractors are

50 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

principal players. In such instances, MITRE and thecommercial contractor have a common interest in
making the government agency successful, but may
find themselves with opposing interests in respect to
how the job is accomplished, or how the contract
between the government and the contractor is written or implemented. When MITRE staff members
and the contractor’s staff members work in a climateof strong mutual understanding, the contractor does
better in terms of eventual revenue as well as in otherways. If the relationship becomes adversarial, however, all parties (including the government) can suffer. It is therefore in the interest of MITRE andgovernment contractors to build and maintain relationships based on full mutual understanding thatend up being productive for all concerned. Since thegovernment typically works with a relatively few
major commercial contractors, it should be possible
for useful relationships to be built with many ofthem. If such relationships are built at senior levels
only, however, they can break down at the local levelin any instance. Attention therefore has to be paid totransferring the relationship from the executive levelto the program level, and to maintaining that relationship through trying times.

Connecting with Suppliers
It can be expensive and difficult for companies tochange important suppliers. A company’s major suppliers come to know their customers’ requirements
and preferences. Much time and effort has usually
been invested in developing knowledge about whatworks in the exchange, and what doesn’t work. If
the connection between the customer and the supplier is strong, areas of dissatisfaction or conflict
between them can be discussed and often resolved
to everyone’s satisfaction. If the connection is notstrong, it is easier to terminate the customer-supplier
relationship – but a substitute has to be found, andexperience, knowledge, and trust has to be painstakingly built. The task of developing durable connections with suppliers requires the same steps or tasks
that are required in the development of other collaborative relationships.

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Connecting with the Other
Supportive Entities
This is the most difficult category to consider,because the important connections are not immediately obvious. We can begin by asking the following
questions:• What groups is our company dependent on for its
resources, environmental sensing, infrastructure,and other supports?
• Where does our company get its employees, andwho educates them? Where do most of them live?
What community functions and services do they
depend on for their families and themselves?
• What industries and industry groups are durably
important to our company?
• What gives us the visibility and reputation we finduseful?
• What groups or entities depend on us?
A company may discover, for example, that its
employees are located mainly in one or two communities, and that the quality of schools in thosecommunities is important to them. They may wish
to contribute time or effort to those schools, or to
the arts, music, and culture of the communities inquestion. They might also discover that many key
employees have come from a particular university,and may decide to become involved in supporting
research or accepting internships from students
at that school. The company may wish to build a
relationship with a newspaper that reaches people
in its area. In considering the taxes the company
pays to a city or county, they may wish to cultivate
relationships with a local government entity, offering
assistance with problems, helping with infrastructure
projects, and so on.
Much of the time required for the building of such
community connections can be donated by thecompany’s employees; it does not have to be costly,or require that people be hired specifically to manage
those relationships.

reflections.solonline.org

The Need for Balance
The notion that building and maintaining connectedness requires attention, energy, thought, and periodic
maintenance should alert us to the possibility that
if too many resources are consumed by this set oftasks, enough may not be available for other essential activities, such as the ordinary daily tasks of thecompany, solitary work, and even creative idleness.
Furthermore, it is conceivable that a narrow focus
on a particular set of connections with people could
impede as well as enhance the peripheral vision thatis essential to detecting potential changes, problems,and opportunities. It may be, then, that there arepoints of diminishing returns in connectedness, andthat past those points the costs of connectedness
with any particular set of stakeholders could exceed
its rewards. Thus a degree of “creative tension”
between advocates of connectedness and advocatesof other activities is important for an organization toassist in maintaining an appropriate balance among
activities. I suspect, however, that many organizations are very far away from the optimal balance
points.

ABOUT THE AUTHORPeter Gumpert, Ph.D. is a cofounder and principal of GLS
Consulting, Inc. He has more than twenty-five years ofexperience working in private and public sector organizations. Prior to joining GLS, Dr. Gumpert was a professor of
psychology at Columbia University and Boston University.
A member of SoL, he continues to teach at the Boston
Institute for Psychotherapy.
pgumpert@glsconsulting.com

EKF ■ Gumpert 51

Endnotes
1

2

Arie De Geus, The Living Company: Habits for Survival
Harvard Business School Press, 1997, 2002)

Oxford University Press, 1993). Another view can be

The 17th century poet John Donne’s meditation XVII

found in the commentary by Vincent Vesterby inseems appropriate here: “No man is an island, entire

www.comdig.com/topic2.php?id_topic=319&sort=1&

of itself...any man’s death diminishes me, because I

haction=add_com&id_msgboard=319.

know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”R. D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revivalof American Community (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
45(New York: The Free Press, 2000)
11 John Stuart Mill, in his Principles of Political Economy(1848), said: “Of all the vulgar modes of escaping
from the consideration of social and moral influence

Zealand Ministry of Social Development, 2002 http:/

on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of/socialreport.msd.govt.nz/2002/social-connectedness/

attributing the diversities of conduct and character tosocial-connectedness.shtml.

inherent natural differences.” Much later, social psy-

Social network theory makes use of maps of the ways

chologist Lee Ross named this common error, andpeople are connected; research on this topic suggests

stimulated a substantial amount of research about itthat social networks play an important role in problem[see L Ross, “The Intuitive Psychologist and His Short-solving, and the degree to which individuals succeed incomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process, in L.

achieving goals. See, for example, R. Guimera, B. Uzzi,

Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (vol. 10) (New York: Academic Press, 1977.)]
12 J. Gharajedaghi, Systems Thinking: Managing Chaos

T. P. M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War andand Complexity (Boston: Butterworth Heinemann, 1999)

Peace in the Twenty-first Century (New York: G.P. Put-

13 J. D. Watson, The Double Helix: A Personal Accountnam’s Sons, 2004)of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA (New York:

M. Niederle, and L. Vesterlund, “Do Women Shy Away

Atheneum,1980)

from Competition?” http://www.stanford.edu/~niederle/
Women.Competition.pdf. 2005.
8

ordinary Results through Attention to Work and People

Social Report on Social Connectedness of the New

2005.

7

10 H. T. Johnson, & A. Bröms, Profit Beyond Measure: Extra-

University Press, 2000)

J. Spiro and L. A. Nunez Amaral in Science, 308, 697,
6

For example, see: S. Kauffman, The Origins of Order:
Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (New York:am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to3

9in a Turbulent Business Environment (Cambridge, MA:

14 M. Treacy and F. Wiersema, The Discipline of Market
Leaders (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1997)

M. Deutsch, Distributive Justice: A Social-Psychological
Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)

52
52 Reflections
Reflections■■Volume
Volume6,
6,NumberNumber6/7
6/7

reflections.solonline.org

BOOK EXCERPTSolving Tough Problems:
An Open Way of Talking,
Listening, and Creating
New Realities

Introduction: The Problem
with Tough Problems

By Adam Kahane
Berrett-Koehler, 2004

Adam Kahane is a leading expert in the design and facilitation of processes that
help people work together to solve their toughest, most complex problems. In this,his first book, he lays forth a few simple principles learned through years of working
in some of the most challenging situations in the world. His stories of success,failure, and discovery make this a highly readable book which, in the words of
Nelson Mandela, “addresses the central challenge of our time.”
Adam KahaneTough problems usually
don’t get solved peacefully.
They either don’t get
solved at all – they get stuck – orthey get solved by force. Thesefrustrating and frightening outcomes occur all the time. Families
replay the same argument over
and over, or a parent lays down thelaw. Organizations keep returning
to a familiar crisis, or a boss decrees
a new strategy. Communities split
over a controversial issue, or a politician dictates the answer. Countries negotiate to a stalemate, orthey go to war. Either the people
involved in a problem can’t agree
on what the solution is, or thepeople with power – authority,money, guns – impose their solution on everyone else.
There is another way to solve
tough problems. The people involved can talk and listen to eachother and thereby work through asolution peacefully. But this way
is often too difficult and too slow
to produce results, and force there-reflections.solonline.org

fore becomes the easier, default
option. I have written this bookto help those of us who are trying
to solve tough problems get betterat talking and listening – so that
we can do so more successfully
and choose the peaceful way more
often. I want talking and listening
to become a reliable default option.
Problems are tough because
they are complex in three ways.
They are dynamically complex,
which means that cause and effectare far apart in space and time,and so are hard to grasp fromfirsthand experience. They are generatively complex, which meansthat they are unfolding in unfamiliar and unpredictable ways.
And they are socially complex,
which means that the people involved see things very differently, and so the problems becomepolarized and stuck.
Our talking and listening often
fails to solve complex problems
because of the way that most of
us talk and listen most of thetime. Our most common way oftalking is telling: asserting thetruth about the way things areand must be not allowing that
there might be other truths andpossibilities. And our most common way of listening is not listening: listening only to our own
talking, not to others. This way oftalking and listening works finefor solving simple problems,
where an authority or expert canwork through the problem pieceBook Excerpt ■ Kahane 53

by piece, applying solutions thathave worked in the past. But a
complex problem can only besolved peacefully if the people
who are part of the problem work
together creatively to understandtheir situation and to improve it.
Our common way of talking
and listening therefore guarantees
that our complex problems will
either remain stuck or will get unstuck only by force. (There is no
problem so complex that it does
not have a simple solution . . . thatis wrong.) We need to learn another,less common, more open way.
I have reached these conclusions after twenty-five years ofworking professionally on toughproblems. I started off my career
as someone who came up withsolutions. first I was a university
researcher in physics and economics, and then an expert analyst of
government policy and corporate
strategy. Then in 1991, inspired byan unexpected and extraordinary
experience in South Africa, I began
working as a neutral facilitator of
problem-solving processes, helping other people come up with
their own solutions. I have facilitated leadership teams of companies, governments, and civil society organizations in fifty countries,
on every continent – from RoyalDutch/ Shell, Intel, Price-waterhouseCoopers,
andFederalExpress, to the Government of
Canada and the European Commission, to the Congress of South
African Trade unions and theAnglican Synod of Bishops – helping them address their organizations’ most difficult challenges.

54 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

And I have also facilitated crossorganizational leadership teams– composed of politicians andguerillas, activists and public servants, clergymen and businesspeople, academics and tradeunionists – helping them addresssome of the most difficult chal-

A complex
problem can only
be solved peacefully
if the people whoare part of the
problem work
together creatively
to understand theirsituation and to
improve it.
lenges in the world: in South
Africa during the struggle toreplace apartheid; in Colombia
in the midst of the civil war; inGuatemala in the aftermath of
the genocide; in Argentina when
the society collapsed; and indeeply divided Israel-Palestine,
Cyprus, Paraguay, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country.
Commuting back and forth
between these different worlds
has allowed me to se how toughproblems can and cannot be
solved. I have been privileged towork with many extraordinary
people in many extraordinary
processes. From these experiences
I have drawn conclusions that
apply not only in extraordinary
but also in ordinary settings. In

the harsh light of life-and-death
conflicts, the dynamics of how
people create new realities are
painted in bright colors. Having
seen the dynamics there, I can now
recognize them in circumstanceswhere they are painted in muted
colors. I have learned what kindsof talking and listening condemn
us to stuckness and force, andwhat kinds enable us to solve
peacefully even our most difficult
problems.
My favorite movie about getting unstuck is the comedy Groundhog Day. Bill Murray plays Phil
Connors, a cynical, self-centered
television journalist who is filming
a story about Groundhog Day,
February 2, in the small town of
Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. He
despises the assignment and thetown. The next morning, he wakes
up to discover, with horror, that itis still February 2, and that he has
to live through these events again.
This happens every morning: he isstuck in reliving the same day over
and over. He explains this to his
producer, Rita, but she laughs it
off. He tries everything he can inorder to break this pattern – getting
angry, being nice, killing himself –but nothing works. Eventually herelaxes into appreciating the present,
and opens himself up to the town
and to Rita. Only then does hewake up to a new day and a better
future.
Many of us are like Phil Connors. We get stuck by holding ontightly to our opinions and plans
and identities and truths. But
when we relax and are present andopen up our minds and hearts andreflections.solonline.org

wills, we get unstuck and we unstuck the world around us. I havelearned that the more open I am
– the more attentive I am to theway things are and could be,around me and inside me, the lessattached I am to the way things
ought to be – the more effective I
am in helping to bring forth new
realities. And the more I work inthis way, the more present andalive I feel. As I have learned tolower my defenses and open
myself up, I have become increas-

reflections.solonline.org

ingly able to help better futures tobe born.
The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with theworld. When we fall into the trapof telling and not listening, we close
ourselves off from being changedby the world. We limit ourselves
to being able to change the world
only by force. But when we talkand listen with an open mind andan open heart and an open spirit,
we bring forth our better selves
and a better world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Adam Kahane is a founding partner(with

JosephJaworski

and

Bill

O’Brien) of Generon Consulting, andof the Global Leadership Initiative. A
member of SoL since 2000, he wasone of the 16 outstanding individuals
featured in Fast Company’s firstannual “Who’s Fast.” Originally from
Montreal, he lives in Boston andCape Town with his wife Dorothy andtheir family.
Kahane@generonconsulting.com

Book Excerpt ■ Kahane 55

-RECOMMENDED READING

Recent and Relevant Work
Many books have crossed my desk

One From Many: VISA andsince the last issue of Reflections,

the Rise of Chaordic Organization

but two provide an interesting con-Dee Hock

trast on the vision and reality ofBerrett-Koehler, 2005

what Alain de Vulpian characterizes
as the “evolving process of civilization.” As always we welcome yourrecommended readings, resources,
and reviews. Please address themto my attention.
— C. Sherry Immediato
One from Many: VISA and theRise of Chaordic Organization
Dee Hock
The Rise of the Rogue Executive:
How Good Companies Go Bad and
How to Stop the Destruction
Leonard R. Sayles and Cynthia
J. Smith

56 Reflections ■ Volume 6, Number 6/7

Most of you are reading this review
courtesy of the Internet in some form.
How did that happen – this Internet
connection? Speaking of which, when’s
the last time you read a story about
the CEO of the Internet? And, whois the CEO of the Internet? Cometo think of it, how does the Internet
work? Not the technology behindit, but its ownership and governance?
Like the Internet, the credit card industry has a vast reach, but few ofus are aware of how this enormous
enterprise formed, or is governedand owned. As its founding CEO,Dee Hock revels in telling the VISA
story, and does so again in One From
Many. This new revised paperback
edition from Berrett-Koehler is an
artful attempt to combine a chronological narrative with key concepts
and learnings. It also includes a newforeword by Peter Senge.
Many salute Dee as a true innovator with impact far beyond VISA.
As a small example close to home,he served as a guiding force in thedesign process for SoL in 1995–1997,
attempting to translate his experiencein self-organizing to our lofty andpractical aspirations. If you have aninterest in SoL’s evolution, you should
read this book. However, Peter Senge
notes that our interest is probably
better directed to the phenomenon
that so intrigued Dee: how can neworganizing enable new thinking, andvice versa? We clearly have manyneeds and aspirations that require
collaboration across traditionalsocial, political and economic

boundaries, and interesting solutions
are emerging. Because existing setsof relationships (like the Internet)
don’t fit our picture of organizations,
we often fail to see them as such. It
doesn’t mean they are not there ofcourse, but our ability to bring moreof them into life, or understand theirimplications for our traditional organizations, is limited by our awareness and understanding of these newforms. Elsewhere in this issue ofReflections, Alain de Vulpian argues
persuasively of the need for limitations of central control and new forms
of self-organizing and self-regulationthat can potentially span the globe.
Dee Hock offers a way to think
about this possibility.

The Rise of the Rogue Executive:
How Good Companies Go Bad and
How to Stop the Destruction
Leonard R. Sayles andCynthia J. Smith
Prentice Hall, 2005
In confronting dramatic cases of corporate corruption, it is tempting
explain them with either of two
equally disempowering possibilities:
a few bad apples took advantageof reasonable freedom, or the entire
system is so broken that we just haveto expect that even average people
will be forced into despicable behavior.
One of the system principles I’ve
found most eye-opening is the practice of seeking a systemic explanation
for system performance as locallyas possible. For example, some years
ago, one of the early suppliers to
the mobile phone industry createda business plan that assumed theiroscillating business performancereflections.solonline.org

was simply linked with the larger
economic business cycle – a welldocumented pattern in the electronics components industry. When theiractual performance proved worse
than expected, they decided to use
systems thinking to investigate. Theirsystem dynamics model yielded aninteresting result: the firm’s investment and executive compensation
policies created lags in capacity thatcreated swings in performance thatwere completely independent of theexternal business cycle. They cameto a shocking conclusion. In thewords of Miss Piggy, the answer tothe question “Moi?” would certainlyreflections.solonline.org

have to be “Oui!” Often when wemeet the culprit, she is neither villain
nor victim of the system – and she’s
looking back at us in the mirror.
So for all our plans to createchange and work with the very positive sociological forces described by
Alain de Vulpian, we really need to
be aware of our habits and lingering
pathologies that produce unintended
and undesirable results. In their new
book, Sayles and Smith seek to define
the local actions and culture as wellas the larger business context thathas created “the rogue executive,” arather perverse result made possible
by increasing autonomy, technology,

etc. The authors offer insight about
the role of the stock market, IT
solutions, auditing, boards, businessjournalists and even academia – inaddition to internal company dynamics in creating the conditions forcorruption. Their goal is to understand larger system issues, but also
to help each of us recognize a degreeof responsibility and possibility that
we may otherwise overlook. While
we need folks like Dee Hock offering
a vision of what’s possible, we alsoneed good analysis of reality to be sure
we’re addressing the systems issues
that can undermine our best efforts.

Book Excerpt ■ Reading
Kahane 57
RecommendedReflections
The SoL Journal

on Knowledge, Learning, and Change
Volume 6, Number 6/7

Editorial Team
Editors-in-Chief
Karen Ayas and Peter Senge
Managing Editor
Nina Kruschwitz
Publisher
C. Sherry Immediato
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