From the Founding EditorO

ne of the most powerful elements of culture is how the self is de ned. Every
culture develops powerful concepts that parents teach their children about
what should and should not be one’s self. These concepts become so ingrained
and taken for granted that we are not aware of them unless they are challenged,
as when someone treats us in a way that is insulting or embarrassing. What
those incidents tell us is that the value that we have placed on ourselves is notreciprocated. Or what we think of ourselves has somehow been violated in theconversation. Threats to self-esteem are intrinsically painful because we want tomaintain our illusions about ourselves.
We have all been very well trained in how to be polite in conversations so
as not to threaten anyone. We laugh at even the poorest jokes. We collectively
ignore incidents such as someone’s atulence in a social gathering. Self-exposureis tricky yet necessary. When we talk of sincerity, integrity, congruence, andknowing where someone stands, we are in each case referring to various aspects
of presentation of the self.
In this issue, we explore various facets of self-presentation and its consequences, leading off with the classic analysis of ‘‘face-work’’ by the late Erving Goffman.
Not all the articles have the dynamics of self as their central theme, but all are relevant.
Stories, for instance, are powerful carriers of culture. In a story, the self can be madevisible. We can identify with the characters and see ourselves through their eyes. When
we get too abstract and conceptual, the self is still there but concealed, which makes it
harder for our audiences to understand where we are coming from.

Ed Schein
1

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

In This Issue
Edgar H. Schein and Karen AyasT2

he dynamics of self in an organized system, elements of social interaction, and theritual roles of the self as a member of a particular community are some of the many
facets of culture explored in this issue, starting with the classic by the late Erving Goffman.
Read and reread Goffman’s thorough analysis of human behavior in social encounters forconceptual insight.
The essays and stories that follow bring out different aspects of the presentation of
the self and culture. Fredrick Simon (with Ketsara Rugchart) shares his experience introducing organizational learning tools and methods to a Thai company and the painful
lessons he learned when he ignored cultural cues of self-presentation in Thailand. Robert
Hanig, a consultant and colleague, comments on the challenges of creating a culturally
acceptable way of exploring different perspectives without the threat of ‘‘losing face.’’
Next, Bill McQuillen, a learning consultant at Shell and champion of change, reveals
his operating model and principles with respect to self. By bringing his whole self into
every situation, without fear of losing face, he encourages others in the system to do thesame. Do not miss the concise commentary by Linda Pierce, who has worked with
McQuillen for many years. She encourages us to articulate our own model to guide ourchoices and behaviors and to pay attention to ‘‘how others experience us.’’Michael Jones, a composer and pianist, brilliantly analyzes the tension we all facewhen we need to decide how much of ourselves to expose in a situation. Lara Nuer andShayne Hughes comment on how Jones speaks to the essence of barriers in the corporate
world and address the practical challenges of enhancing our skills to ‘‘feel the moment,’’
be present, and give in to emergence in the workplace.
Some tools to illuminate this path are offered in the next articles on stories and storytelling. Annette Simmons underscores the bene ts of bringing stories, poetry, and metaphor into the business world, the legitimacy of the ‘‘subjective,’’ and the dangers of solely
relying on an analytical approach. In the commentaries that follow, Judy Sorum Brown
explains how, in her own practice, stories have created a path to deeper understanding
and a playing eld for exploration and self-disclosure. Ipek Kursat points to the necessityof stories in learning from tradition and of objective tools in moving to action.
Scott Thompson shares a poem and re ections on a visit to the Butchart Gardens inVancouver, an abandoned limestone quarry that Jennie Butchart transformed into a spectacular garden.
Next, Robert Dickman outlines the four elements of every successful story. Beth
Jandernoa, in her comments, tells an episode of her own story using Dickman’s framework. Michael Sales and Marshall Goldsmith each expand on how and why we shouldtake the opportunity to tell a great story.
We close the issue with Vic Leo’s story as told by George Roth. Now looking backon his years at Ford from a completely different perspective, the former executive at theforefront of numerous organizational change efforts calls us to reect: To what extent are
we ready if a culture change involves major changes of self?

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSContributors

4

Karen Ayas is associate editor, Re ections; research fellow, Erasmus University; and partner, The Ripples Group.
Gene Beyt is a photographer and teacher of leadership and organizational learning at
Tulane University. ^gbphoto@earthlink.net&
Judy Sorum Brown is an author, educator, and poet.
Patricia Anne Carisella is founder and director of art2work.
Robert Dickman is the founder of FirstVoice, a communications consultancy.
Erving Goffman (deceased) was the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology andSociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Marshall Goldsmith is founding director of A4SL, the Alliance for Strategic Leadership,
and coeditor of Coaching for Leadership.
Robert Hanig is a vice president at DiaLogos.
Shayne Hughes is a principal of Learning as Leadership.
Beth Jandernoa is a founding partner of The Ashland Institute.
Michael Jones is a pianist, composer, speaker, and educator; a consulting member of theSociety for Organizational Learning; and a senior research fellow with the James
McGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, University of Maryland.
Rachel Lillian Kohn is a photographer located in Somerville, MA. ^rachel@rachelkohn.com&
Ipek Kursat is an individual, group, and organizational coach.
Vic Leo is a former program manager, Executive Development Center, Ford Motor Company. Presently, he is a resident artist at Baron Glassworks, Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Bill McQuillen is a learning consultant at Shell Oil Company.
Lara L. Nuer is a principal of Learning as Leadership.
Linda Pierce is the retired executive director of the Executive Leadership Team, Shell Oil
Company.
George L. Roth is a research associate, MIT Sloan School of Management.
Ketsara Rugchart is a senior analyst in process development, Petroleum Authority ofThailand—Exploration and Production.
Michael Sales is a principal at New Context Consulting, which provides customized experiential education for organizational learning and change.
Annette Simmons is president of Group Process Consulting. Her books include The Story
Factor: Inspiration, In uence and Persuasion Through the Art of Storytelling (Perseus,2001).
Fredrick Simon is an independent consultant, a member of the governing council of theSociety for Organizational Learning, and an adjunct faculty member of the Universityof Michigan. He has 30 years of automotive experience with Ford Motor Company.
Emily Sper is a photographer, graphic designer, and author-illustrator in Boston, MA.
^www.sperphoto.com&
Scott Thompson is assistant director of the Panasonic Foundation, a corporate philanthropy devoted to the transformation of public education in the US, and editor ofStrategies.
Jeff Wright is a glass artist and photographer. ^jeffry.carl.wright@usa.net&

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSOn Face-Work:An Analysis of Ritual
Elements in Social
Interaction
Erving GoffmanEvery person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him either in face-to-faceor mediated contact with other participants. In each of these contacts, he tends to act
out what is sometimes called a line—that is, a pattern of verbal and nonverbal acts bywhich he expresses his view of the situation and through this his evaluation of the participants, especially himself. Regardless of whether a person intends to take a line, he will
 nd that he has done so in effect. The other participants will assume that he has more orless willfully taken a stand, so that if he is to deal with their response to him he must take
into consideration the impression they have possibly formed of him.
The term face may be de ned as the positive social value a person effectively claims
for himself by the line others assume he has taken during a particular contact. Face is animage of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes—albeit an image that others
may share, as when a person makes a good showing for his profession or religion bymaking a good showing for himself. . . .
In our Anglo-American society, as in some others, the phrase “to lose face” seems tomean to be in wrong face, to be out of face, or to be shamefaced. The phrase “to save
one’s face” appears to refer to the process by which the person sustains an impression
for others that he has not lost face. Following Chinese usage, one can say that “to giveface” is to arrange for another to take a better line than he might otherwise have beenable to take, the other thereby gets face given him, this being one way in which he cangain face.
As an aspect of the social code of any social circle, one may expect to nd an understanding as to how far a person should go to save his face. Once he takes on a self-image
expressed through face he will be expected to live up to it. In different ways in different
societies he will be required to show self-respect, abjuring certain actions because they
are above or beneath him, while forcing himself to perform others even though they cost
him dearly. . . .
The combined effect of the rule of self-respect and the rule of considerateness is thatthe person tends to conduct himself during an encounter so as to maintain both his own
face and the face of the other participants. This means that the line taken by each participant is usually allowed to prevail, and each participant is allowed to carry off the role heappears to have chosen for himself. A state where everyone temporarily accepts everyone
else’s line is established. This kind of mutual acceptance seems to be a basic structuralfeature of interaction, especially the interaction of face-to-face talk. It is typically a “working” acceptance, not a “real” one, since it tends to be based not on agreement of candidlyexpressed heart-felt evaluations, but upon a willingness to give temporary lip service tojudgments with which the participants do not really agree.

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Erving Goffman
Formerly Benjamin Franklin Professorof Anthropology
and Sociology
University of Pennsylvania

7

From Interaction Ritual by Erving
Goffman, copyright 1967 by Erving
Goffman. Used by permission ofPantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. and the Erving Goffman Trust.

GOFFMANx
On Face-Work

Gene Beyt
Q

8

The mutual acceptance of lines has an important conservative effect upon encounters. Once the person initiallypresents a line, he and the others tend to build their later
responses upon it, and in a sense become stuck with it.
Should the person radically alter his line, or should it become discredited, then confusion results, for the participants will have prepared and committed themselves foractions that are now unsuitable.
Ordinarily, maintenance of face is a condition of interaction, not its objective. Usual objectives, such as gaining face for oneself, giving free expression to one’s true
beliefs, introducing depreciating information about theothers, or solving problems and performing tasks, are typically pursued in such a way as to be consistent with themaintenance of face. To study face-saving is to study thetrafc rules of social interaction; one learns about the code
the person adheres to in his movement across the paths
and designs of others, but not where he is going, or why
he wants to get there. One does not even learn why he isready to follow the code, for a large number of different
motives can equally lead him to do so. He may want tosave his own face because of his emotional attachment to
the image of self which it expresses, because of his prideor honor, because of the power his presumed status allows
him to exert over the other participants, and so on. He
may want to save the others’ face because of his emotional
attachment to an image of them, or because he feels that
his coparticipants have a moral right to this protection, or
because he wants to avoid the hostility that may be directed toward him if they lose their face. He may feel thatan assumption has been made that he is the sort of person
who shows compassion and sympathy toward others, so that to retain his own face, he
may feel obliged to be considerate of the line taken by the other participants.
By face-work I mean to designate the actions taken by a person to make whatever heis doing consistent with face. Face-work serves to counteract “incidents”—that is, events
whose effective symbolic implications threaten face. Thus poise is one important type offace-work, for through poise the person controls his embarrassment and hence the embarrassment that he and others might have over his embarrassment. Whether or not thefull consequences of face-saving actions are known to the person who employs them, theyoften become habitual and standardized practices; they are like traditional plays in a gameor traditional steps in a dance. Each person, subculture, and society seems to have its
own characteristic repertoire of face-saving practices. It isto this repertoire that people partly refer when they ask
what a person or culture is “really” like. And yet the particular set of practices stressed by particular persons or groups
seems to be drawn from a single logically coherent framework of possible practices. It is as if face, by its very nature,
can be saved only in a certain number of ways, and as if
each social grouping must make its selections from this single matrix of possibilities.
The members of every social circle may be expected to have some knowledge of facework and some experience in its use. In our society, this kind of capacity is sometimes
called tact, savoir-faire, diplomacy, or social skill. Variation in social skill pertains moreto the ef cacy of face-work than to the frequency of its application, for almost all acts
involving others are modied, prescriptively or proscriptively, by considerations of face.
If a person is to employ his repertoire of face-saving practices, obviously he must rst
become aware of the interpretations that others may have placed upon his acts and theEach person, subculture, andsociety seems to have its own
characteristic repertoire of facesaving practices.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSGOFFMANx
On Face-Work

interpretations that he ought perhaps to place upon theirs. In other words, he must exercise perceptiveness. But even if he is properly alive to symbolically conveyed judgments
and is socially skilled, he must yet be willing to exercise his perceptiveness and his skill;
he must, in short, be prideful and considerate. Admittedly, of course, the possession ofperceptiveness and social skill so often leads to their application that in our society terms
such as politeness or tact fail to distinguish between the inclination to exercise such capacities and the capacities themselves.
I have already said that the person will have two points of view—a defensive orientation toward saving his own face and a protective orientation toward saving the others’
face. Some practices will be primarily defensive and others primarily protective, althoughin general one may expect these two perspectives to be taken at the same time. In trying
to save the face of others, the person must choose a tack that will not lead to loss of his
own; in trying to save his own face, he must consider the loss of face that his action may
entail for others.
In many societies there is a tendency to distinguish three levels of responsibility thata person may have for a threat to face that his actions have created. First, he may appear
to have acted innocently; his offense seems to be unintended and unwitting, and those
who perceive his act can feel that he would have attempted to avoid it had he foreseen
its offensive consequences. In our society one calls such threats to face faux pas, gaffes,
boners, or bricks. Secondly, the offending person may appear to have acted maliciously
and spitefully, with the intention of causing open insult. Thirdly, there are incidental
offenses; these arise as an unplanned but sometimes anticipated by-product of action—action the offender performs in spite of its offensive consequences, although not out ofspite. From the point of view of a particular participant, these three types of threat canbe introduced by the participant himself against his own face, by himself against the faceof the others, by the others against their own face, or by the others against himself. Thus
the person may nd himself in many different relations to a threat to face. If he is tohandle himself and others well in all contingencies, he will have to have a repertoire offace-saving practices for each of these possible relations to threat. . . .

Cooperation in Face-Work
When a face has been threatened, face-work must be done, but whether this is initiatedand primarily carried through by the person whose face is threatened, or by the offender,
or by a mere witness, is often of secondary importance. Lackof effort on the part of one person induces compensative effort from others; a contribution by one person relieves theothers of the task. In fact, there are many minor incidents inwhich the offender and the offended simultaneously attempt
to initiate an apology. Resolution of the situation to everyone’s apparent satisfaction is the  rst requirement; correct
apportionment of blame is typically a secondary consideration. Hence terms such as tact and savoir-faire fail to distinguish whether it is the person’s own face that his diplomacy saves or the face of theothers. Similarly, terms such as gaffe and faux pas fail to specify whether it is the actor’s
own face he has threatened or the face of other participants. And it is understandable that
if one person  nds he is powerless to save his own face, the others seem especially boundto protect him. For example, in polite society, a handshake that perhaps should not havebeen extended becomes one that cannot be declined. Thus one accounts for the noblesse
oblige through which those of high status are expected to curb their power of embarrassing
their lessers, as well as the fact that the handicapped often accept courtesies that they canmanage better without.
Since each participant in an undertaking is concerned, albeit for differing reasons,with saving his own face and the face of the others, then tacit cooperation will naturally
arise so that the participants together can attain their shared but differently motivatedobjectives.
One common type of tacit cooperation in face-saving is the tact exerted in regard to
face-work itself. The person not only defends his own face and protects the face of the

If one person nds he is powerlessto save his own face, the others
seem especially bound to protect
him.

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

9GOFFMANx
On Face-Work10others, but also acts so as to make it possible and even easy for the others to employ facework for themselves and him. He helps them to help themselves and him. Social etiquette,
for example, warns men against asking for New Year’s Eve dates too early in the season,
lest the girl  nd it dif cult to provide a gentle excuse for refusing. This second-order tact
can be further illustrated by the widespread practice of negative-attribute etiquette. The
person who has an unapparent negatively valued attribute often nds it expedient to begin
an encounter with an unobtrusive admission of his failing, especially with persons who
are uninformed about him. The others are thus warned in advance against making disparaging remarks about his kind of person and are saved from the contradiction of acting
in a friendly fashion to a person toward whom they are unwittingly being hostile. This
strategy also prevents the others from automatically making assumptions about him whichplace him in a false position and saves him from painful forbearance or embarrassing
remonstrances.
Tact in regard to face-work often relies for its operation on a tacit agreement to dobusiness through the language of hint—the language of innuendo, ambiguities, wellplaced pauses, carefully worded jokes, and so on. The rule regarding this unofcial kindof communication is that the sender ought not to act as if he had ofcially conveyed themessage he has hinted at, while the recipients have the right and the obligation to act as
if they have not of cially received the message contained in the hint. Hinted communication, then, is deniable communication; it need not be faced up to. It provides a meansby which the person can be warned that his current line or the current situation is leading
to loss of face, without this warning itself becoming an incident.
Another form of tacit cooperation, and one that seems to be much used in manysocieties, is reciprocal self-denial. Often the person does not have a clear idea of what
would be a just or acceptable apportionment of judgments during the occasion, and so
he voluntarily deprives or depreciates himself while indulging and complimenting theothers, in both cases carrying the judgments safely past what is likely to be just. The
favorable judgments about himself he allows to come from the others; the unfavorable
judgments of himself are his own contributions. This “after you, Alphonse” technique
works, of course, because in depriving himself he can reliably anticipate that the others
will compliment or indulge him. Whatever allocation of favors is eventually established,
all participants are rst given a chance to show that they are not bound or constrainedby their own desires and expectations, that they have a properly modest view of themselves, and that they can be counted upon to support the ritual code. Negative bargaining,
through which each participant tries to make the terms of trade more favorable to theother side, is another instance; as a form of exchange perhaps it is more widespread thanthe economist’s kind.
A person’s performance of face-work, extended by his tacit agreement to help others
perform theirs, represents his willingness to abide by the ground rules of social interaction.
Here is the hallmark of his socialization as an interactant. If he and the others were notsocialized in this way, interaction in most societies and most situations would be a much
more hazardous thing for feelings and faces. The person would nd it impractical to beoriented to symbolically conveyed appraisals of social worth, or to be possessed of feelings—that is, it would be impractical for him to be a ritually delicate object. And as I shallsuggest, if the person were not a ritually delicate object, occasions of talk could not be
organized in the way they usually are. It is no wonder that trouble is caused by a person
who cannot be relied upon to play the face-saving game.

The Ritual Roles of the Self
So far I have implicitly been using a double de nition of self: the self as an image pieced
together from the expressive implications of the full ow of events in an undertaking; andthe self as a kind of player in a ritual game who copes honorably or dishonorably, diplomatically or undiplomatically, with the judgmental contingencies of the situation. A
double mandate is involved. As sacred objects, men are subject to slights and profanation;
hence as players of the ritual game they have had to lead themselves into duels, and wait
for a round of shots to go wide of the mark before embracing their opponents. Here is anecho of the distinction between the value of a hand drawn at cards and the capacity ofVolume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSGOFFMANxQ

On Face-Work

the person who plays it. This distinction must be kept in
mind, even though it appears that once a person has gotten
a reputation for good or bad play this reputation may become part of the face he must later play at maintaining.
Once the two roles of the self have been separated, one
can look to the ritual code implicit in face-work to learn
how the two roles are related. When a person is responsiblefor introducing a threat to another’s face, he apparently has
a right, within limits, to wriggle out of the difculty bymeans of self-abasement. When performed voluntarily
these indignities do not seem to profane his own image. It
is as if he had the right of insulation and could castigate
himself qua actor without injuring himself qua object ofultimate worth. By token of the same insulation he can belittle himself and modestly underplay his positive qualities,
with the understanding that no one will take his statements
as a fair representation of his sacred self. On the other hand,
if he is forced against his will to treat himself in these ways, his face, his pride, and hishonor will be seriously threatened. Thus, in terms of the ritual code, the person seems tohave a special license to accept mistreatment at his own hands that he does not have theright to accept from others. Perhaps this is a safe arrangement because he is not likely tocarry this license too far, whereas the others, were they given this privilege, might bemore likely to abuse it.
Further, within limits the person has a right to forgive other participants for affronts
to his sacred image. He can forbearantly overlook minor slurs upon his face, and in regard
to somewhat greater injuries he is the one person who is in a position to accept apologies
on behalf of his sacred self. This is a relatively safe prerogative for the person to have inregard to himself, for it is one that is exercised in the interests of the others or of theundertaking. Interestingly enough, when the person commits a gaffe against himself, it is
not he who has the license to forgive the event; only the others have that prerogative,
and it is a safe prerogative for them to have because they can exercise it only in his
interests or in the interests of the undertaking. One nds, then, a system of checks andbalances by which each participant tends to be given the right to handle only those matterswhich he will have little motivation for mishandling. In short, the rights and obligationsof an interactant are designed to prevent him from abusing his role as an object of sacredvalue. . . .

Emily Sper

Face and Social Relationships
When a person begins a mediated or immediate encounter, he already stands in somekind of social relationship to the others concerned, and expects to stand in a given relationship to them after the particular encounter ends. This, of course, is one of the ways
in which social contacts are geared into the wider society. Much of the activity occurring
during an encounter can be understood as an effort on everyone’s part to get through theoccasion and all the unanticipated and unintentional events that can cast participants inan undesirable light, without disrupting the relationships of the participants. And if relationships are in the process of change, the object will be to bring the encounter to asatisfactory close without altering the expected course of development. This perspective
nicely accounts, for example, for the little ceremonies of greeting and farewell which occur
when people begin a conversational encounter or depart from one. Greetings provide away of showing that a relationship is still what it was at the termination of the previous
coparticipation, and, typically, that this relationship involves sufcient suppression of
hostility for the participants temporarily to drop their guards and talk. Farewells sum up
the effect of the encounter upon the relationship and show what the participants may
expect of one another when they next meet. The enthusiasm of greetings compensates
for the weakening of the relationship caused by the absence just terminated, while theenthusiasm of farewells compensates the relationship for the harm that is about to bedone to it by separation.

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

11

GOFFMANx
On Face-Work

It seems to be a characteristic obligation of many social relationships that each of themembers guarantees to support a given face for the other members in given situations.
To prevent disruption of these relationships, it is therefore necessary for each member toavoid destroying the others’ face. At the same time, it isoften the person’s social relationship with others that leads
him to participate in certain encounters with them, whereincidentally he will be dependent upon them for supporting
his face. Furthermore, in many relationships, the members
come to share a face, so that in the presence of third parties
an improper act on the part of one member becomes asource of acute embarrassment to the other members. A
social relationship, then, can be seen as a way in which theperson is more than ordinarily forced to trust his self-image and face to the tact and good
conduct of others.

A social relationship is a way inwhich the person is forced to trust
his self-image and face to the tactand good conduct of others.

The Nature of the Ritual Order12

The ritual order seems to be organized basically on accommodative lines, so that theimagery used in thinking about other types of social order is not quite suitable for it. For
the other types of social order a kind of schoolboy model seems to be employed: if aperson wishes to sustain a particular image of himself and trust his feelings to it, he must
work hard for the credits that will buy this self-enhancement for him; should he try toobtain ends by improper means, by cheating or theft, he will be punished, disquali edfrom the race, or at least made to start all over again from the beginning. This is theimagery of a hard, dull game. In fact, society and the individual join in one that is easieron both of them, yet one that has dangers of its own.
Whatever his position in society, the person insulates himself by blindnesses, halftruths, illusions, and rationalizations. He makes an “adjustment” by convincing himself,with the tactful support of his intimate circle, that he is what he wants to be and that hewould not do to gain his ends what the others have done to gain theirs. And as for society,if the person is willing to be subject to informal social control—if he is willing to nd out
from hints and glances and tactful cues what his place is, and keep it—then there will be
no objection to his furnishing this place at his own discretion, with all the comfort, elegance, and nobility that his wit can muster for him. To protect this shelter he does nothave to work hard, or join a group, or compete with anybody; he need only be careful
about the expressed judgments he places himself in a position to witness. Some situations
and acts and persons will have to be avoided; others, less threatening, must not be pressed
too far. Social life is an uncluttered, orderly thing because the person voluntarily stays
away from the places and topics and times where he is not wanted and where he might
be disparaged for going. He cooperates to save his face,  nding that there is much to begained from venturing nothing.
Facts are of the schoolboy’s world—they can be altered by diligent effort but theycannot be avoided. But what the person protects and defends and invests his feelings in
is an idea about himself, and ideas are vulnerable not to facts and things but to communications. Communications belong to a less punitive scheme than do facts, for communications can be by-passed, withdrawn from, disbelieved, conveniently misunderstood,
and tactfully conveyed. And even should the person misbehave and break the truce hehas made with society, punishment need not be the consequence. If the offense is one
that the offended persons can let go by without losing too much face, then they are likely
to act forbearantly, telling themselves that they will get even with the offender in anotherway at another time, even though such an occasion may never arise and might not be
exploited if it did. If the offense is great, the offended persons may withdraw from theencounter, or from future similar ones, allowing their withdrawal to be reinforced by
the awe they may feel toward someone who breaks the ritual code. Or they may have theoffender withdrawn, so that no further communication can occur. But since the offender
can salvage a good deal of face from such operations, withdrawal is often not so muchan informal punishment for an offense as it is merely a means of terminating it. Perhaps
the main principle of the ritual order is not justice but face, and what any offender receives

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSGOFFMANx

Throughout this paper it has been implied that underneath their differences in culture,people everywhere are the same. If persons have a universal human nature, they themselves are not to be looked to for an explanation of it. One must look rather to the factthat societies everywhere, if they are to be societies, must mobilize their members as selfregulating participants in social encounters. One way of mobilizing the individual for thispurpose is through ritual; he is taught to be perceptive, to have feelings attached to self
and a self expressed through face, to have pride, honor, and dignity, to have considerateness, to have tact and a certain amount of poise. These are some of the elements of
behavior which must be built into the person if practical use is to be made of him as aninteractant, and it is these elements that are referred to in part when one speaks of universal human nature.
Universal human nature is not a very human thing. By acquiring it, the person becomes a kind of construct, built up not from inner psychic propensities but from moral
rules that are impressed upon him from without. These rules, when followed, determine
the evaluation he will make of himself and of his fellow-participants in the encounter, thedistribution of his feelings, and the kinds of practices he will employ to maintain a specied and obligatory kind of ritual equilibrium. The general capacity to be bound by moral
rules may well belong to the individual, but the particular set of rules which transforms
him into a human being derives from requirements established in the ritual organizationof social encounters. And if a particular person or group or society seems to have a uniquecharacter all its own, it is because its standard set of human-nature elements is pitchedand combined in a particular way. Instead of much pride, there may be little. Instead ofabiding by the rules, there may be much effort to break them safely. But if an encounteror undertaking is to be sustained as a viable system of interaction organized on ritual
principles, then these variations must be held within certain bounds and nicely counterbalanced by corresponding modi cations in some of the other rules and understandings.
Similarly, the human nature of a particular set of persons may be specially designed forthe special kind of undertakings in which they participate, but still each of these persons
must have within him something of the balance of characteristics required of a usable
participant in any ritually organized system of social activity.

On Face-Work

is not what he deserves but what will sustain for the moment the line to which he hascommitted himself, and through this the line to which he has committed the interaction.

13

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Lessons from Creatinga Learning Organization
Fredrick Simon with Ketsara RugchartT

his tale of a one-year effort to help a major oil and gas exploration and production
company become a learning organization is also a story of working in Thailand andhow I addressed— or failed to address— cultural issues in my approach.
The Thai company had begun employing organizational learning (OL) concepts in1998 when a manager and a senior analyst in the organization and process development
department introduced the concepts, based on information they had read. By de ninglearning organizations as those in which best practices are shared among teams, they
addressed the greatest perceived weakness of the company at the time. They had some
initial success when two staff teams began to share more effectively, but they wanted to
expand the effort and recognized that they needed outside help.
Fredrick Simon
Independent consultant
Member, SoL Governing Council
Adjunct faculty member, Universityof Michigan
FSimon1810@aol.com

14

Ketsara Rugchart
Senior analyst in processdevelopment
Petroleum Authority of Thailand—
Exploration and Production

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
qWhat Is a Learning Organization?
In August 2000, I went to Thailand to give the senior managers an overview of OL andexplore with them the possibilities of undertaking a project together. The  rst day of mytwo-day visit was devoted to a general awareness session. I de ned a learning organization as one that is continually enhancing its ability to get the results it truly wants. We
then explored that de nition in more detail. I explained that understanding what an organization wants requires dialogue to create a shared vision that has meaning for all
employees and connects with their personal visions. It also requires a de nition of sharedvalues in how we act as we work toward the vision. Alignment of the vision and commitment to its accomplishment require the ability to have open, honest conversations
about what is important—to be able to listen to each other without judging or attributing
motives. Taking action toward the vision requires an understanding of the complex systems in which we operate and the sometimes counterintuitive effects of those systems on
our behavior. I briey reviewed the organizational learning tools and methods, as de nedin The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990), that we could use to accomplish each of these steps
in our effort to get better results.
Later, we had a more detailed discussion of their previous de nition of a learningorganization as one that shares best practices, which some managers de ned as a knowledge management (KM) and information technology effort. Organizational learning, while
broader in scope in my de nition, can facilitate KM in a number of ways.
First, alignment of a common vision reduces competitiveness and the associated notinvented-here factors, allowing for greater demand for the shared knowledge —theinformation-retrieval side of the equation.
Second, the greatest learning takes place in failure, when things don’t go as expected.
Yet, in most organizations, success is what is shared, while failure is covered up. In alearning organization, shared vision and the understanding that we need each other toachieve the vision lead to a willingness to be open and to risk vulnerability by sharing
learning from failure as well—the more complete, input side of the equation. Organizational learning does not replace KM tools, but can provide a substantial accelerator to theKM effort.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSThe leading petroleum exploration and production company, with operational excellence,
international best practices, and world-class competitive strengths.

Together, we began to explore the words in the vision. The managers felt that operational
excellence required efciency and productivity. Ef ciency and productivity in production
meant either producing more per man-hour or producing the same amount at lower cost.
When I asked how much lower the cost would have to be, the managers responded that
it would be lower than that of their major competitor in the region. I asked whether theyknew what their competitor’s cost was, and they told me. We then agreed on how much
lower their cost would have to be to achieve this speci c outcome and established a‘‘vision’’ for the cost of an equivalent barrel of energy.
Given the speci c vision for cost, we explored possible mental models. One of the
key mental models the managers identied was that Thais could do the work without
foreign (that is, high-cost) experts. We then began to explore systemic structures consistent with that new mental model and identied a new training structure in which theemployment contract would require that part of an expatriate worker’s time would bespent training Thais to do his job, so that after two years, the expatriate workers would
no longer be required. I then asked the president if such a contractual structure wasincluded in the strategic plan, and he said it was not. This, then, is one difference madein the strategic plan because of using OL tools and methods.
After the session, the president and his key executives discussed the approach andsaid that they wanted to know more. I developed a broad outline for a one-year intervention, with me acting as an outside consultant and with the work largely centered on using
the tools and methods of OL to improve senior management interrelationships and thestrategic planning process. My primary client would be the president, with support from
Ketsara Rugchart and the internal OL consultants. I refused a one-year contract, the usual
way of doing business, saying instead that I would be happy to work with no contract
and to stop at any time we felt I was not adding signi cant value.
At this point, I thought we had agreed on goals for the year. I later found that somekey management people had not attended the session, and not all of those who had
attended understood or agreed with those goals. In addition, some still thought this wasa limited KM project.

The Effects of Cultural Differences
When the next session began, it was not what some of the managers had expected. They
were confused about the subject matter and were used to polished presentations of neatly
packaged answers instead of mutual exploration of tough questions. But, because of theimportance of ‘‘face’’ in the Thai culture, they ‘‘protected’’ me by not raising these issues.
Instead, I found that after each of the next three sessions, one of the vice presidents
requested a vote on whether we should continue the effort.
After the third vote (22–4 to continue), Ketsara and I met with the president and a
key vice president. The president again asked where we were going and what would be
the bene ts. The vice president then spoke for an extended time in Thai. No one translated

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

SIMON AND RUGCHARTx

The greatest learning takes placein failure, when things don’t go
as expected.

Lessons from Creating a Learning Organization

At the start of the second day of my visit, the president asked me to help themunderstand by providing a more speci c example of how being a learning organization
might affect their strategic plan. I thought that the best illustration would be to use the vision deployment matrix (VDM)
technique I had learned from Daniel Kim (Kim, 1997). The
VDM, as I interpret it, is based on two principles: (1) focus
on the vision, and (2) act at the level of highest leverage (seetable 1). We see and take action most often at the level of
events—individual, discrete happenings—or, at best, at thelevel of patterns—trends of events over time. The VDM helps us to refocus our efforts onhigher leverage, systemic structures, or assumptions behind those structures, to improve
results.
I began by stating the vision of the company as already published:

15

SIMON AND RUGCHARTx
Lessons from Creating a Learning Organization

Table 1 Vision deployment matrix
DesiredfutureCurrent reality

Gap

Actions
to close gap

VisionMental models
Systemic structures
Patterns
Eventsfor me. (I learned later that he said my approach was not that of a polished trainer, thatthe material was not appropriate for the Thai culture, and that we should stop the project.)
When he nished, it was clear that they were waiting for me to speak and that I
would not have a chance to respond to the vice president’s comments. I began by reminding the president that I am not a professional trainer but a retired Ford Motor Co.
line manager who implemented these OL techniques in my own organization with exceptional results. I went back over what we hoped to gain through OL, what we had accomplished so far, and what was next. I pointed out that to get
the desired results would take the group’s commitment; I
didn’t know how they could commit to something when
they didn’t know from session to session whether we would
continue. I suggested that it might be better to suspend thework until they were sure of what they wanted to do, because to continue in this way would be a waste of my time
and their money. I offered to help  nd someone to work with them at a later date if theydecided to continue. This was a turning point in the project; after this meeting, no further
votes were taken and the project proceeded with commitment from most of the managers.
The openness and honesty assumed as a goal of organizational learning can, in fact,
be countercultural. In this Thai organization’s mental models, saving face and respecting
and following orders from older and higher placed individuals was the norm. It became
apparent, however, that some of the best results came from the ability to overcome thecultural inhibition to openness and honest, respectful disagreement, as I discuss later. A
shared vision can have a powerful effect in overcoming existing cultural norms.

The openness and honesty assumed
as a goal of organizational learningcan, in fact, be countercultural.

Creating a Learning Structure
16

In the early sessions, the managers and I worked on the role of leadership and personaland shared vision and values. We developed shared meanings for the words in the vision,
determined outcomes that would indicate success, and quantied the measurements wewould use. During this effort, we began to practice conversation tools, systems thinking,the VDM, and dialogue, but tools were introduced only when they helped further theorganization’s work.
At the same time, we began to form a reective-partner network one level down fromthe senior leadership group. We called the participants ‘‘learning leaders.’’ I explained tothe senior managers the value of reective partners as trusted members of their staffs who
could reect—hold up a mirror or be the mirror—to them their espoused and actual
behavioral differences. The purpose was not to be judgmental, but to help them understand how patterns in their behavior affected others and had an impact on what theywanted to accomplish. I asked for and obtained their agreement to initiate the process
and asked each of them to designate a person to play this role.
Our learning structure now included an outside consultant (me); two inside consultants, including Ketsara, as partners in design, diagnosis, feedback, and support; and acore group of learning leaders who would be reective partners for the senior executives
and could help accelerate the spread of OL tools and methods throughout the company.
The learning leaders began to learn about the ve disciplines (Senge, 1990) and how to
be good reective partners to an individual or a group. Learning was through lecture,

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSSIMON AND RUGCHART
Lessons from Creating a Learning Organizationx

conversation, dialogue, exercises, and role playing. We developed a contract for them to use with their senior management partner.
When the re ective partners were to begin working
with their designated partners, however, I found that somesenior managers had appointed a person they could spareat the moment and that they could not actually work withthat person in the reective-partnering role. I realized I
should have spent more time on the requirements for a re ective partner, reviewed the partnering contract with thesenior managers, and then allowed some time before asking
them to designate someone.
About halfway through the project, with continuing individual and group coaching with Ketsara and monthly
group reinforcement from me, the re ective-partnering relationship improved, and there was some progress in senior
managers’ understanding of each other and of the process
to deploy the vision. At this point, we began to look at thestrategic planning process.

An OL Approach to Strategic Planning
The company’s approach to strategic planning was similar
to that of most organizations. The strategic planning department assessed the company’s strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities, and threats and developed a strategic plan.
It presented and discussed the plan in detail at a senior
management retreat; it was modi ed as required and approved. The plan was then expanded to add individual department objectives, with appropriate departmental input,
and then given to the rest of the organization to implement.
A strategic planning process based on OL principles isvery different. The vice president for strategic planning and I believed that it should focus
on vision rather than reacting to competition. We also believed that an OL-based strategicplan would build alignment and commitment throughout the organization and allow those
closest to the work to help de ne an action plan to fulll the strategy.
Starting at the point of highest leverage, as discussed earlier, an OL-based strategicplan would build a shared vision throughout the 35 departments, align department visions
with the company vision, permit employees to see how their individual day-to-day work
would help achieve the vision, and gain all employees’ commitment to action, recognizing
the structural leverage points for effective action. We presented a proposal for a new OLbased strategic planning process to the senior management group and got their endorsement.
Implementation of the plan began when senior managers revisited the company vision and questioned whether it contained suf cient emotion, excitement, and inspiration
for all employees. In a dialogue, we expanded some of the meanings, at least for internaluse. We then claried the words by specifying measurements to indicate when we would
have reached the vision. We had to pay a great deal of attention to the meanings of ‘‘worldclass’’ and ‘‘leader.’’
Next, we held a strategic planning management retreat in June 2001. We spent the rst part of the retreat verifying the vision and its expected outcomes; reviewing theexternal environment scan in terms of technological advances, potential demand, andcompetitive activity; and identifying the key strategic questions. We then presented asystems map, describing the interrelationships and systemic links among key environmental criteria and the organization (Senge, 1990). From the systems map, we identi ed
the four highest leverage areas of the map for senior managers’ focused effort. Senior
managers developed VDMs and action plans for the high-leverage areas. These plans
became the cornerstone of the total strategic planning effort. We then developed metrics

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Q

Karen Ayas

17

SIMON AND RUGCHARTx
Lessons from Creating a Learning Organization

to assess progress in the four key areas and proposed them for the managers’ consideration. The purpose of this effort was to develop some unique, nontraditional measures that
could be used internally to keep managers focused on the vision, rather than on traditional
historical measures.
The OL-based strategic planning process was then spread throughout the organization. Each of the 35 departments had a ‘‘learning lab.’’ The labs, conducted by Ketsara,
included a detailed explanation of the company vision, a departmental strategic-visionsession, and alignment with the company vision. This was followed by speci c planning
efforts based on a VDM. Ketsara con rms that this was the rst time that everyone, at alllevels, was involved in the strategic plan and understood how their individual and departmental work contributed to the company’s success. Employees’ comments after thesessions indicated that they appreciated the process; many mentioned it favorably in theannual employee feedback questionnaire.

Results of the OL Effort
In January 2002, I visited the company again to check the progress of the previous six
months and to aid in the OL plans for 2002 (see, also, the sidebar). I saw some speci cresults on that visit:xx One manager told about an exploration project in which the senior, most experienced

18

x

x

x

x

people who read the seismic data had given instructions on where and how deep todrill an exploratory well. In the past, their instructions would have been carried out
as given. They would have accepted no other result. In this case, the more juniorpeople, building on their experiences with OL, offered their opinions on the data andtheir interpretation of where they should drill. They said the seismic data indicated adome at a lesser depth and suggested targeting the well at that dome. That they spokeout and the senior people listened was unusual and counter to Thai and company
cultures. It was agreed to drill to the location of the suspected dome instead of to theoriginal location. The result was a savings of $3.4 million in drilling costs, a reduction
in drilling time, and a tripling of the total reserve.
A vice president in charge of a large natural gas production operation in the Gulf ofThailand told another story. After being promoted to take over the production facility,
he saw an opportunity to increase the sale of natural gas. But it required a major
increase in production output. Using OL tools, he established communication withall the workers (not just the managers) in de ning their direct connection to theenterprise’s success. Together, they developed a commitment to create the needed
production increase. The result was an increase in production from 550 million cubicfeet of natural gas per day to 650 million—an increase of 18% with no added manpower or premium costs. Later, after the results were in, senior managers recognized
the workers’ effort and gave bonuses to all involved.
As a result of the new approach to strategic planning, the operations division (responsible for all production) committed to an additional 15% reduction in the cost of
production and a new effort to achieve operational excellence.
Dialogue and the use of re ective partners spread throughout the organization. In
one example, a department manager had engendered fear in all his people. They
would watch his eyes to determine his mood and felt that he did not believe them. A
dialogue was conducted by Ketsara as part of the OL effort, and the ensuing conversation shocked the manager. He said he did not intend to behave that way and would
try to change. The department members are now working together smoothly.
Most top management people now have reective partners and bring them to key
meetings. Ketsara and the senior people recognized a signi cant improvement in how
they prepare for meetings and how they listen to each other. One observed that there
were fewer cross-conversations in senior management meetings and that the conversation tools and VDM were used in most department meetings. In January 2002, are ective partner attended the board of directors’ meeting for the rst time.
Fewer decisions from senior management meetings are being brought back to thegroup for reevaluation. When it becomes evident in a meeting that there are different
mental models inherent in statements, the president asks for a re ective conversation
to understand each mental model before the meeting can continue.
Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONS

2. Have sensitivity but not subservience to the culture. My second major mistake in working
within the Thai culture was my lack of sensitivity and how it might affect what I could see andunderstand. I had been visiting Thailand for 20 years, mostly for pleasure, before this assignment.
I had some understanding of Thai customs and believed that I could work effectively in the culture. I failed to recognize that I was not getting the level of honesty I expected in people’s feedback. My insensitivity prevented me from understanding that my message was not getting
through as effectively as I would have liked.
How could I have assumed that organizational learning principles of open, honest communication were being accepted, when Thai culture considers ‘‘face’’ most important? The organization
colluded with me in order to save my ‘‘face’’ by not telling me that my message needed to bemodied. If I had been more sensitive from the beginning, I might have been able to modify themessage by advancing a dialogue held much later in the engagement about the inuence of‘‘face’’ on effectiveness in business.

SIMON AND RUGCHARTx

1. Get commitment to the project. If I had only one lesson to offer, it would be to make sure theclient understands fully that this is not a quick x—that all personnel will have to make a substantial time commitment and that the client’s up-front commitment is an essential ingredient.
One of the biggest mistakes I made, one that cost months of wasted effort and agonizing meetings, was not obtaining that up-front commitment. I thought I was making it easier for the client
by rejecting the idea of signing a one-year contract with appropriate cancellation penalties before
we started. Instead I said that we would stop the effort any time either of us believed my visitswere not adding signicant value. In fact, not knowing from visit to visit how much longer wewould continue caused a wait-and-see attitude and a consequent lack of commitment in theearly months.

Lessons from Creating a Learning Organization

Lessons Learned

3. Before the start of the project, agree on what success will look like and whose participation in the process will be essential. Agreement on what to measure to dene success, how tomeasure, and how much is enough is essential before the start. I spent many meetings trying toanswer the same questions about what results we were getting and where we were going. Once
we understand success, we can name the people in the organization who will be critical to thatsuccess. Obtaining the commitment of those critical people to participate actively in the wholeprocess will make the effort considerably more effective.
4. Create an internal partnership and an internal capacity-building structure. My partnershipwith Ketsara helped me to understand what was happening and helped translate my thoughts
when they were not understandable in the culture. Ketsara worked with key leaders between visits and coached the reective partners. Her efforts were absolutely essential to the success of the
project.
5. Use the vision deployment matrix (VDM) in conjunction with the new strategic planning
process. I am most proud of the new approach we developed for strategic planning. Incorporating the VDM into the strategic planning process and using the learning organization tools forgrassroots strategic planning achieved a greater level of understanding and commitment
throughout the company.
19

x One vice president pointed out that there had been a signi cant change in the ad-xministration and services department. In the learning labs, work on the new visionand values has become the basis for a new way of behaving. In a further investigationof the changes in the department, we found that: (1) Car Pool Services supplied mobile
phones to the drivers so the passengers waiting for pickup and return can reach them;(2) the waiting area in the garage was decorated with owers and furnished withcouches; and (3) its use, restricted to managers, was expanded to all employees.
Everyone appreciated this change because the waiting room is air-conditioned andthe average temperature outside is in the low nineties. The head of the department
now uses conversation tools in her staff meetings, and employees are no longer afraid
to talk about their problems.
In a meeting I attended with the re ective partners, Ketsara asked: ‘‘How many ofyou have observed a positive change in behavior?’’ Eleven raised their hands, while
three said they observed little or no change. Some of their comments were:
Alignment around department goals has resulted in increased sharing, dedication, and abetter understanding of how departments need each other.
They personally commit to their department vision; this year’s work plan is aligned withthat vision.

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

SIMON AND RUGCHART

In one department, the manager created the vision and gave it to the employees; it wasuninspiring.

The next question to the reective partners was: ‘‘Has your reective partnering
work helped? If so, what is the difference you see?’’ Some comments from six ofthe people were:Lessons from Creating a Learning Organizationx

There’s an improvement in my boss. He changed from exploding to asking questions. He
listens more to other’s comments. He shows more respect.
There is better follow-up on work.
There has been more commitment to the tools and the use of dialogue to improve communication.
My boss tries to listen to other people’s ideas. He used to just cut them off.
There is more focus on observable data instead of jumping to conclusions.
Vice presidents at management meetings are becoming less defensive in their behavior.

Plans for Progress and Sustainability
Senior managers have endorsed the following actions, which were planned for 2002 implementation:

x Create a learning center.

x Initiate a 360 degree feedback system for all managers and above. Evaluate the possibility of extending it to all levels.

x Establish a nine-meeting lecture and workshop series on OL for all new employees
to help them understand the behavior the company wants.

x Design a guide for continuing the learning organization practices in every department.
x Continue the reective-partnering program with the vice presidents.

x Set up a systems-mapping expert team available to help anyone in the company.
x Set up regularly scheduled, learning organization knowledge-sharing meetings.

x Provide support from Ketsara initially and later the reective partners for any company group interested in conducting dialogues.

x Set up measures to permit evaluation and discussion with senior managers of progress
toward becoming a learning organization.

Is It a Learning Organization?

20

Now that the project is complete, the obvious question is, ‘‘Is the company now a learningorganization?’’ This question reminds me of taking a long car trip and hearing the small
voice from the backseat asking, ‘‘Are we there yet?’’ Someone once told me that there isno ‘‘there’’ when it comes to learning organizations, that it is a process of becoming rather
than being.
In answering the question, I would have to say that different parts of the organizationand different key people are at different places along the journey. Our best clues are in
the stories we hear and in the measurable results we can see:x A manager described the ability of junior people to question their elders and superiorsxx

in the exploration project and of their superiors to listen to their work with the OL
tools. This is an example of open, honest communication in pursuit of a shared exploration vision taking precedence over cultural norms.
The ability to increase production by 18% is an example of commitment to a sharedvision.
The ability of a senior leader to enter an open, honest dialogue with workers outside
the chain of command is an example of creating the passion for action.

Could these results have happened anyway? Perhaps, in time. Was there some other cause
for these extraordinary results? Possibly. The people involved in the work attribute theresults to OL. I believe the Thai company is well on the path of organizational learning,with Ketsara providing the internal capacity and the managers displaying the will to continue the journey. Efforts are continuing. I believe the company is making substantial

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSSIMON AND RUGCHART

progress and getting better results. I learned a great deal on this project and hope thissummary proves helpful to other consultants and practitioners.

References

Lessons from Creating a Learning Organizationx

Kim, D. ‘‘Vision Deployment Technique.’’ Systems Thinker, 1997.
Senge, P. The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1990).

Commentaryby Robert Hanig
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Fred Simon’s article for two reasons. First, there are few better examples of the intelligent application of learning organization principles, tools, and methods. Second, I
was one of the practitioners considering and being considered for the project. This circumstanceembodies one main reason I remain part of the SoL community —to benet and learn from colleagues’ efforts and experiences in the creation, expansion, and application of capabilities for individual and collective learning.
Simon’s statement, ‘‘The greatest learning takes place in failure, when things don’t go as expected,’’ is a key theme and one lesson the organization should have learned from the manner inwhich Simon conducted the overall intervention. Although the impressive section on ‘‘Results of
the OL Effort’’ is an example of the required, tangible results of the project, the subtle yet genuine
modeling of the core tenets of the OL approach is of equal or greater value.
I am also reminded of the adage, ‘‘Give a man a sh and you feed him for a day; teach a manto sh and he can feed himself for a lifetime,’’ as I consider Simon’s approach to enriching thecompany’s strategic planning process. Rather than simply creating or enhancing a set of documents called a strategic plan, Simon’s approach enhanced the capacity for fairly extensive, ongoingstrategic conversation in both the tangible, results-oriented (using the vision deployment matrix)
and cultural domains. This capacity, similar to the one explored by Kees Van Der Heijden (1996), isof greater value and is more enduring than simply creating and adhering to a particular plan basedon a snapshot of the forces and circumstances inuencing a system at a particular time.
As someone who has been involved in many global and multicultural projects, I appreciate thecultural challenges of this type of project. I have come to appreciate not only the differences but
also the inherent value of cultural norms that may not make sense at rst. Honoring the coreintent of a custom while rening its application to contemporary challenges and structures is anexpression of respect that often speaks louder than our ideas or concepts. Simon’s approach of‘‘reective partnerships’’ is a wonderful example of creating a culturally acceptable way to explore
different perspectives without the threat of ‘‘losing face’’ in a more public setting.
Finally, Simon’s section on lessons learned is not only a valuable example of displaying one’s
reasoning and one’s conclusions but also a wonderful start to a dialogue exploring what additional
lessons a rich experience like this might contain —dialogue I intend to have with Simon in the near
future.

Reference
Van Der Heijden, K. Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation (New York: Wiley, 1996).

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Robert Hanig
Vice President
DiaLogos
Lave99@aol.com

21

Opening Doorways
to a Better Life at Work:A Conversation
with Bill McQuillen
Karen Ayas

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
—Henry David Thoreau

Bill McQuillen
Shell learning consultant

22

In July 1975, straight from college, Bill McQuillen joined Shell as a process engineer in thechemicals manufacturing plant in Louisiana and soon became the operations manager.
After four years as an operations manager in a larger plant, he became manager of training
and organizational effectiveness in a manufacturing complex of 3,000 employees. A tragic
accident with seven fatalities in May 1988 caused a major shift in his life’s work. He moved
into a corporate role, starting as a technical manufacturing training manager, and foundhis way to the corporate center for organization development. He served as an architect for
Shell’s business and cultural transformation from 1993 to 1996, created the Shell Learning
Center in 1996, and subsequently led the global Shell internal consultancy called LEAP
(Leadership and Performance) in the Americas.
McQuillen has been associated with the MIT Organizational Learning Center (now
SoL) since 1991 and has been serving on the SoL Governing Council since June 2000. A
question asked at a council meeting triggered this conversation. Newly elected members
were asked to share what they are really passionate about, how their work fuels their
passion, and how what they do and who they are connects with SoL.
The  rst part of the conversation focuses on McQuillen’s passion: to help people invarious ways to improve the quality of their work experience. McQuillen explains how hehas come to recognize his own gifts and his deep attraction for helping people. In the second
part, we explore how a person can create the conditions to improve the quality of life atwork or elsewhere and how to sustain them. Finally, the conversation reveals the impactof organizational learning work on Shell in the past decade.
Karen Ayas (KA): You have been with Shell for 26 years. And you say that you are still
passionate about what you do. How do you keep your passion alive at work?

Karen Ayas
Associate Editor, Reections
Research fellow, Erasmus University
Partner, The Ripples Group
Kayas@attbi.com

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
qBill McQuillen (BM): My passion is for helping people in a variety of different ways. I
have been doing that since my early days at Shell. In both my engineering job and myoperations management job, I would spend 90% of my time talking to people about what
they were experiencing in their work and how they could change it to be more satisfying
for their lives and their work. Later on, I moved into doing the same thing on an organizational level.
The senior leaders who were watching me at the time asked me to take on a formalrole to develop leaders. That is how I moved into a training job. I was reluctant to do thisat rst, but after being in training and development, I began to discover the larger world

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSAYASxOpening Doorways to a Better Life at Workof organization development (OD). At rst, I was a single consultant doing all kinds ofinteresting things.
For the past 13 years, I’ve been focused speci cally on training, development, leadership, systems thinking, strategic planning, organizational design, development, largegroup interventions, change management, and so on. I never had any formal OD training.
I’ve read a few books, of course, and attended some seminars. But I am far away fromwhat I was educated to do. And almost exclusively, I use my intuition for what I thinkneeds to be done.
I don’t operate from the standpoint of gathered data and facts. I frequently use mygut sense of the way things are. When I propose solutions, I don’t necessarily have a solid
theoretical foundation. But what I’ve learned is that instinct and intuition may well be
the most important things you have going for you. Explicit knowledge —what you canread about and learn about—may be far overstated as an important requirement for success. Maybe as you go through the formal education process, you actually diminish yourown belief in the accuracy and efcacy of your intuition and instinct. Ten years ago, I rst started realizing that if I would simply listen to my intuition, I would always be intouch with the real, authentic situation.
KA: What was your intuition telling you?
BM: That I am attracted to certain things in my work, because they seem to resonate witha bigger purpose, destiny, or calling. The more I paid attention to what seemed to deeply
capture my interest, the more I lined up with everybody around me.
This kind of introspective conversation made me realize that I’m terribly interested
in the quality of people’s experience on earth. I have a general sense that most people
aren’t very happy. Thoreau said, ‘‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’’ A
couple of key things about that statement are that it’s about the ‘‘masses’’ and it’s about‘‘quiet’’ rather than expressed desperation. It’s very difcult to work on anything that is
not made explicit. So I spend a lot of time simply trying to nd out what seems to behappening in people’s hearts and minds.
KA: Why are other people’s experiences so important to you? What inuences shapedyou?
BM: My mother inuenced me in a most remarkable way. When I was four years old, mymother would sit with my brother, who is a year younger, under one arm and me under
the other arm to keep control of us while we were in church. In those days, this lasted
for an hour and a half, a miserable experience for a four-year-old kid. My mother noticed
me watching an interaction between another mother and child, who had been misbehaving. His mom slapped him in the face really hard. My mother leaned over and whispered
in my ear, ‘‘What do you suppose that child is thinking right now?’’
KA: You were only four years old and yet you remember this so vividly?
BM: It was transformative in the way that I experienced life. By eighth grade, I was alreadyoperating on a bit of a different wavelength from most of my friends. My mother sustained
this because she would listen very carefully to what I was saying and talk to me.
I didn’t recognize for many years that needing to create
a better situation around me, as opposed to just being in asort of state of stunned wonderment all the time, was a formof gift. There’s a lot of unhappiness in our world, and thebulk of that unhappiness is generated within poorly constructed institutions. People who are living in nature, suchas farmers or forest rangers, have a different quality of experience in what it means to be human. Growth is ostensibly a fairly painful process.
Learning is invariably attended by some kind of negative emotion. Creating any kind ofa meaningful relationship is rife with all kinds of negativity.
In many Western societies, we’re taught that we should strive for safety, security,and stability. People get set on that course, like the Great American Dream to have two
homes, many grandchildren, and by age 60, you sit on your butt with your feet up andcruise for 40 years. That’s not living.

Needing to create a better
situation around me was a formof gift.

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Opening Doorways to a Better Life at WorkOf the people that I encounter, 75% are always grinding away at some pretty major
problem with their world. When I  nally began to recognize that, I started caring a lot
about what people said about their experiences. There isn’t anything more important tome than understanding how the average person feels and thinks about what is happening
inside of Shell.

Enhancing the Quality of Workplace Experiences
KA: What can you do about what people are experiencing? How can you improve thesituation?
BM: Very often I help them reframe what they’re experiencing. I just help them develop
a new language for describing what they’re experiencing— a language that has more
perspective, which embraces diversity. Frequently, all it takes to improve people’s whole
outlook on life is a good conversation about how they’re thinking about their experiences
and offering them some new ways to think.
On the other hand, as I talk to enough people in a system, I begin to recognize that
there are enormous structural defects in the way that we have created companies. They
almost institutionally prohibit people from feeling alive.
KA: Can you give me some example of such structural defects?
BM: Look at the number of levels of approval it takes to get expense reimbursements insome big companies. That formal policy has existed for 50 or 60 years and is essentiallyrooted in the fact that you do not trust your own people.
The company is doing all kinds of other things to show how
much it trusts people, yet still has all these countereffective
structures, some very subtle.
My role, as I see it, is to be a burr under the saddle, tobe thorn in the side, to be a grain of sand in the oyster, andthen sustain the irritation, which is a form of creating tension. And to have condence that the process of the collective will resolve favorably.

My role is to be a burr under
the saddle and then sustain theirritation, which is a form ofcreating tension.

KA: How do you create the conditions for that to happen?

24

BM: By bringing my whole self into every circumstance. For instance, I usually bring mynonsensical self and my highly liberalized self when operating in a highly conservativeenvironment, or I bring my American self when I’m in an international environment. I
bring my right brain and my left brain and manifest that in my behavior. It is an almost
seductive invitation to other people to do the same. You can almost feel everyone in theroom change. A lot has to do with walking around with a huge respect for other people
and seeing them as myself.
All the ways in which people see themselves as different actually don’t exist. William
Isaacs’s concept, ‘‘fragmentation is an illusion,’’ is absolutely profound. When you consider all the ways in which people are the same, the differences become insigni cant. If
you live in a world of noticing differences, you will always be conrming to yourself that
there’s a separation between me and you. If you see another living, breathing humanbeing, then we can embrace each other in a different way. I can love your dark side —thethings you think are really wrong with you—probably more than you can. The more I do
that, the more I can cause people’s favorable dimensions to emerge.
KA: How much of that can you really bring into a work context? How many people canyou have an impact on?
BM: I do a lot of large-group interventions, big workshops with 200 to 300 people. I
sometimes look at my workshops as a bully pulpit, not in a literal sense, but as I design
the events, I include stuff that helps to create a learning environment. People experience
these workshops as helpful, engaging, and entertaining.
For example, in a big workshop to launch the new IT organization, I held a dialogue
with the top 240 leaders of the IT community, which I labeled the ‘‘IT leadership community.’’ Ten minutes from the end, someone said, ‘‘You know, it just occurred to me

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSAYASOpening Doorways to a Better Life at Workxthat we really have been behaving like a community here.’’Some questioned if we were behaving as a community because of the label. That may have helped. But, consistently,
when I open workshops and say, ‘‘Good morning, Champions,’’ it works. If I say, ‘‘Greetings, O Great One,’’ itworks.
It makes good intuitive sense to me. I love to go into a
meeting and say, in a kind of amused tone, looking up in
the corner, ‘‘I wonder what we’re going to be able to create
together over the next two days.’’
KA: Does that work all the time because people listen to
the question? Is inviting them in the key?
BM: Yes, it’s also giving permission and signaling thatsomething is going to be different. It’s inviting a whole different way of being into the room, welcoming the side ofpeople that frequently gets ignored. Our institutional norms
have tried to create conformance. It’s so much easier tomanage then.
KA: You would probably say that conformance prevents
people from bringing their authentic selves to the organization. How do you help people break free of this conformance?
BM: My approach has to do with the fact that all forms ofchange, all forms of development, pass through the doorway of awareness. So, rst and foremost, the initial step isalways raising awareness of what is real. Once you have
one foot planted  rmly in reality, you can start to become
visionary. I try to raise people’s awareness of their actual
experience. Gradually, I move the conversation from‘‘them, there and then’’ to ‘‘us, here and now.’’ This is very
delicate, almost manipulative work.
I’ve been successful with two or three leadership teams who have understood thatthey don’t need to go any further than themselves to understand almost anything about
the system. Some, because of the heavy responsibility of leadership, pretend that thingsaren’t really the way they are. But deep down in their souls, they’re actually experiencing
what other people are experiencing. Even if they’re at the top, they’re experiencing it.
Some are masking it; others are in denial.
Q

Emily Sper

KA: But they may not even be aware.
BM: That’s true. There are also many senior people who are really unhappy. Their ability
to inuence anything is pretty small. Because of fairly low self-esteem, they feel emasculated; they really don’t have all the power that their title
suggests they have. Most senior leaders can’t imagine anyone
else feels this way. They think this is a unique part of being
on top.
The secret to change is all bottled up in that incipient
moment in time when a leader nally says leadership has
almost nothing to do with the way he or she thinks and feels.
It has to do with the way they think and they feel. As soon as leaders begin to listen to
people, they can see what really needs attention.

As soon as leaders begin to listen
to people, they can see what reallyneeds attention.

Helping Senior Leaders
KA: Do you frequently encounter resistance when you try to help?
BM: Most of my work is attended by an enormous amount of resistance. Usually, I do

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Opening Doorways to a Better Life at Worknot start working with the larger system until I have established with the top person andhis or her leadership team what we collectively believe should be the direction.
No matter where I’m working, that’s my predominant way to enter the system. I maynd out in the rst 15 minutes of conversation that they don’t know for sure why theywant what they want. They’re not operating on really solid ground to begin with. So one
of two things will happen. One is that I simply help them come up with a different aspiration than the one they began with. The second is that they realize that the distance
between what they want and where they currently are is a lot more signi cant than they
thought. I help them appreciate that they, as the senior sponsoring group, are going tohave to be terribly committed to this whole process if we’re going to go from where they
are to where they want to be.
I tell them that I’ve never run a business and that they shouldn’t ask me to help themdecide where they should go. What I do instead is to help them create a high-quality spaceand environment for a rich conversation in which where to go becomes self-evident. You
don’t have to dream this up. You need to talk about the situation and the system, andeventually it’ll occur to all what the next step should be. There’s always a sensible way
in which systems evolve and progress. You need to discern what it is. But it’s hard to dothat amid an advocacy war, sitting around a table with people screaming at each other. I
just try to calm everyone down and make better sense of what they want and where they
currently are. Sometimes, people see me as a behavioral cop.
KA: A therapist too?
BM: Oh, de nitely. It’s always funny when someone says something like, ‘‘I really don’tknow if I need any help or if I even really have a problem.’’
I’m not afraid to reveal things about myself that I believe most people are afraid toreveal. I don’t have any difculties talking about my fears, shortcomings, and insecurities.
I wear this stuff all over me, and sometimes people  nd that to be scary and intimidating.
They don’t want to be around me. But most people like it because it’s another form ofgiving them permission to talk about something that is not the norm.
KA: You’re showing vulnerability.

26

BM: Exactly. In my last job, my two chief accountabilities were to coach the chief information ofcer (CIO) of Shell and his leadership team. As I engage in those kinds of interventions, I discover frequently that they’re most concerned about the group right below
them. So I cascade or drill deep into the system, ultimately nding myself on the factory
oor or with the people at the help desk, because I need to have a good appreciation of
how the whole system works. I go out and have many conversations and then sit back and re ect. Then I’ll say to thesenior leader, ‘‘You know, that’s not consistent with what
I actually experienced when I went out and talked to yourpeople.’’ Sometimes he’ll say, ‘‘Well, I think you’re justmaking this up to try to leverage me.’’ And I’ll just reply, ‘‘You don’t need to take myword for this. I encourage you to go and  nd out.’’ In and of itself, that’s an enormousintervention. The CIO going to talk to the people who are running the help desk is unheardof. But as soon as the CIO talks to the people at the help desk, a whole bunch of things
get better.
I tell the CIO that he has done the most important thing by indicating with his simple
presence and generosity of spirit that he cares. That’s what most people in organizations
really want to know. What leaders fear is that they’re going to go out there and be asked
questions that they don’t have the answers for. Or they’ll get problems that they don’t
have solutions for. It just takes a small amount of coaching to help leaders deal with thoselittle bugaboos, and then they discover that that’s not what is going on at all.
The most fun I have in coaching executives is when I ask them what their legacy inthe organization will be. For senior people, this is the rst time that they’ve ever entertained the notion of legacy.

Legacy is the sum of the stories
that people tell about you.

Legacy and Sustainability
KA: How would you de ne legacy?
BM: Legacy is the sum of the stories that people tell about you. It’s not the edi ces that
Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSKA: What would you like your legacy to be?
BM: That I helped people to see very different possibilities for what life is all about andwhat the human experience is all about. This is what I would like people to say about
me: ‘‘When I met that guy, he opened up some doorways and some avenues that reallyhelped me a lot.’’ That would be a satisfying result in my life, that somehow I helped
people.

AYAS
xOpening Doorways to a Better Life at Workyou’ve built. It’s not the masterful project management. It’s not the P&L statement. It’s
the stories that they’ll tell about you. So what stories do you want people to tell about
you? And do you have any inuence on the stories that people tell? The question createsinteresting disturbances in people that are useful from a coaching standpoint. Even more
useful is the question about what you’re most afraid of in your work or in your personal
life. What do you fear the most? It’s typically not what comes  rst to mind, unless you’vebeen on a great spiritual journey for some time. For most people, it’s buried beneath acouple of layers.

KA: The notion of legacy made me think of sustainability. Often it is easier to initiatechanges than sustain them. As you coach or intervene in the system, there is a shift in
the frame of thinking and acting. The client system in the organization you are working
with gradually becomes more human and people feel more alive and whole. In yourexperience, how sustainable has that been?
BM: It depends on whether you can achieve critical mass or not. The longer I’ve worked
in a system, the longer I’ve brought these kinds of concepts and this way of being, themore sustainable it is. I believe that a single individual can make an enormous difference
in a large system. I’ve experienced it.
KA: Can you refer to a speci c example?
BM: Frequently, there are some people in workshops who hold eye contact with me foran extended period of time. I sense that they’re following me very carefully. About 75%of the time that I’ve had that experience, those people turned out to be operating according to beliefs similar to mine. I immediately invited them tolead what we’re trying to do. I’ve walked up and said, ‘‘You
seem to really understand what I’m trying to create here,
and I would love your help.’’ Most people are enormously attered.
After a while, you may end up with 15, 18, or 20 suchpeople in a room. And if you can sustain a more authentic
way of being with one another in a room for two days, I think you get three to six monthsof momentum in the entire system as a result. That manifests itself sometimes as a newform of excitement or proliferation of an optimistic curiosity.

A single individual can make anenormous difference in a large
system.

KA: Do you organize periodic events to sustain the excitement?
BM: Denitely. I’ve had a couple of relationships within client systems at Shell for 12 to
18 months of sustained work. I have observed the excitement that follows an importantlarge event in which people are very authentic and truthful with each other, and that
percolates throughout the system for three to six months. The quality of that improves
over several cycles. We can start the second major event at a much higher plane than westarted the  rst one.
KA: I couldn’t agree with you more. But how do you frame such initiatives so that top
management accepts and supports them?
BM: I’m usually doing two things all the time. One is what other people seem to expect
of me. The other is what I really think I should be doing. So, I’m always careful to satisfy
what others expect of me, rst and foremost, because I consider that to be earning mylicense to operate the way I want to. If I come in and try to change people’s agenda, I’m
in trouble. I always go with whatever it is that they seem to want to do. Something I’ve
learned over the years is I don’t care much about agreement on what we’re going to work
on. The important thing is to get the relationship established under whatever circumstances work for both parties.
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Opening Doorways to a Better Life at Work

Then, as I work on whatever they want to work on, I slowly interject questions that
gradually move the agenda to where it needs to be. Sometimes that’s where I think it
needs to be, because my intuitions are reasonably accurate. Other times, where the groupends up is a complete surprise to me and to the sponsoring client.
Twice I started a three-day workshop with no agenda. Structured meetings frequently
don’t work because they are created by someone with a partial view of what is importantsome months before the meeting. There is a lot of spin going into what someone thinks
is a worthwhile topic for a big group. No one individual knows what a group needs; thegroup itself knows. This is a dialogic concept having to do with how radically different
collective intelligence is from the sum of the product of individuals. You have to believethat there is an otherworldly entity called the collective. And you have to have con dence
that it’s real and attend to it. And guess what? It begins to show up. It’s the most amazing
thing when I get into that sort of ow with the group, where they’re experiencing
something that I think they know in their heart of hearts they could not experience as
individuals.

Organizational Learning
KA: It strikes me that you have not made any reference to organizational learning. Shellhas been a pioneer in the development of the organizational learning tools and methods
as a member of MIT’s Organizational Learning Center (OLC) in 1991. And myunderstanding based on the success stories I have heard and read is that OL wasinstrumental in creating profound change led by Phil Carroll. Where were you during thisperiod? Were you involved?
BM: I was Linda Pierce’s [then executive director to the Executive Leadership Team]lieutenant, her right-hand man, during the emergence of all of this. When Phil Carroll
took over as CEO in 1993, he knew about me because of some disturbing questions I
asked him in public. He had a different reaction than other senior leaders might. He
recognized a question that had value and merit rather than thinking about who asked thequestion.
He called me one day to tell me he was getting ready to transform Shell. He waslooking for some really good people who care about the human element at work to becomearchitects of the transformation. He asked if I’d be interested.
I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Linda was the primary adviser and coordinator of what
we did at Shell. I was her arms and legs. Then I gradually became another form of Linda’s
voice and eventually became another form of Phil’s voice. I was deeply involved andspent lots of time coaching the top 200 leaders at Shell Oil. I helped work out some newthings in our governance model.
28

KA: So why didn’t you mention organizational learning when we talked about how to
improve people’s experiences?
BM: I typically do not use buzz words, terminology, or labels for organizational learning.
I’m very conscious of the language that I use within Shell. I use a lot of the OL concepts,
tools, and methods, but I don’t tell people that I’m using them. If I talk to people about
personal mastery or creating shared vision, their attention just switches off. They’re inoculated against this stuff.
KA: Why? What can we learn from this?
BM: There are two main reasons why OL at Shell got out of control. Back in 1995, there
were about 200 people who went through intensive development programs at the OLC
and deep personal mastery experiences that were all rooted in the disciplines of the learning organization. Many became mindless zealots, to the extent that you couldn’t have ameeting without a lengthy check-in at which some fairly senior people were baring theirsouls. That was never the intention of a check-in, yet they somehow took it to a ridiculous
degree, and it was in vogue.
There are a lot of examples of this zealotry, but suf ce it to say that about 25 or 30of these people, in various places throughout the US, behaved in a really funny way. Of

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSAYASxOpening Doorways to a Better Life at Work

those who had been through similar developmental experiences, 75% weren’t behavingthat way and were the harshest critics. One example is when people got hold of theconcept of the ‘‘left-hand column.’’ Some senior Shell person would say, ‘‘All right, timeout. It’s time to do a left-hand column check. I want everybody to give me the worst thatyou’ve got going.’’ That’s not what was intended with the left-hand column, of course.
You don’t dump your toxic load. But they would do that. At one chemical plant, theleadership team had a weekly meeting with a feature on the agenda called the ‘‘Left-Hand
Column Dump.’’So some of this was zealotry or a misunderstanding and misuse of the concept. But
Phil Carroll and some other fairly senior people went overboard telling stories of what
was happening at Shell and improvements in performance that were chiey due to the
OL work. Later, Shell’s nancial performance in the US dropped like a rock. Phil Carroll
left Shell right before things turned sour. He and the board couldn’t come to terms. He
wanted to stay for ve more years to see his vision through because he had just gotten
started. People couldn’t bring themselves to say that the reasons why things didn’t work
very well was because of three or four terrible business decisions that upset the whole
portfolio. It was the wrong period of time; there was a huge cost structure and few revenue
sources. But people couldn’t say it was due to a lack of good business sense. So instead,they blamed all the ‘‘voodoo’’ stuff that Peter Senge brought in. Senior people said thisin public, and it spread like wild re throughout the company. All the advocates slowly
moved off the front lines and took a couple of steps back. Many have continued to live,
advocate, and celebrate the whole body of work, but they’ve been doing it in a more
quiet, circumspect way.
KA: So do you believe that OL has been helpful to Shell? What has shifted in the past 10
years?
BM: The quality of relationships, manifested by the quality of conversation, has gone way
up in this period of time. The way people interact in meetings shows whether relationships
are good or bad. Conversations have become quite open, partially due to a three-day
learning experience using OL tools. Bringing the conversational tools of engagement tobear on business situations, of course.
We did this with a large group of people at Shell, some 20,000 outside the US. Inside
the US, we had close to 10,000. In our chemicals organization, every single person learned
these skills. That took about four years of sustained resolve by a senior leadership group.
In that organization, you can smell the difference when you walk in.
KA: This is a success story I have not heard before, quite an impressive one.
BM: It’s de nitely one worth writing about. The problem I have with some of the stories
about Shell is that they made the key individuals seem like very important people. It’s
not that they weren’t, but they weren’t as instrumental and integral to what happened asthey suggested in their writing.
People are self-serving to a certain degree in what they write, especially in successstories. When someone like Peter Senge asks someone like Phil Carroll to tell his story,
Phil would tell the story in a way that makes himself look really good. Even if that’s not
the case, listeners would infer that. What was really taking place inside Shell is a more
complicated situation than can be accounted for by the special guy that Phil is. He wasan enabler to something that was waiting to happen.
KA: It’s so difcult to capture the story of the transformation in large, complex organizations. Most transformation stories have no single ‘‘hero.’’ Yet that’s what people want
to hear, and what publishers seek.
BM: Sure, but for me, what’s always missing from the story is that the essence of the goodidea—the essence of the change—already existed before the hero showed up. Rarely does
this key individual bring in the wisdom that helps cause a change to occur. The best kindof leaders come in, listen, and discover what wants to emerge and then enable it.
KA: They just  nd a way to tap into the collective intelligence and put it to work.

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BM: Exactly. But it’s a very scary thing for a leader, in the current business climate, to go
into a situation that may be rife with problems, with an approach that taps into thecollective intelligence. There’s almost something counterintuitive about that. If the collective intelligence is there, why isn’t high performance there as well?

Commentary
by Linda Pierce

Linda Pierce
Executive Director to Executive
Leadership Team, retired
Shell Oil Company
lbpierce@mcia.com

30

Bill McQuillen’s story is familiar and consistent with my own experience. This is not surprising because we worked closely together during Shell Oil’s transformation led by CEO Phil Carroll. And it is
not surprising that I take issue with some of McQuillen’s comments. For example, I don’t agreewith his denition of the American Dream, or his assertion that most learning and relationships
involve pain and negative emotions, or the story behind Phil Carroll’s choice to leave Shell, or the
judgment that other people’s stories are self-serving.
After teasing out the few parts with which I take issue, I nd a valuable story for championsof change in a large system. Change agents must have a clear purpose and a set of operating
principles that guide their work authentically. Without such a model, the risk of being seen as amanipulator is high. McQuillen shares the core of his operating model. I offer the following as
headline descriptions of some of these principles, as I hear them, and encourage the reader todiscover the deep meaning in McQuillen’s story:
1. Listen to my intuition so that I can always be in touch with the real, authentic situation.
2. Bring my whole self into every circumstance to awaken and invite the amazing latent diversity
and talent in others.
3. Raise the awareness of what is real with ‘‘us, here and now’’ as the rst step toward creating
vision.
4. Provide support in creating the space and environment for rich conversation in which where to
go becomes self-evident.
5. Be vulnerable to encourage useful vulnerability in others.
6. Earn my license to operate by satisfying what others expect of me, while doing what I think I
ought to be doing.
This interview is a gift to readers whose work is to lead or support large-scale change processes. Readers can use McQuillen’s operating model as an example to form their own model. Several years ago, with a great deal of reection, I articulated my own set of change-agent principles,
and they continue to be my daily guide.
McQuillen refers to a denition of legacy that I nd very useful: our legacy is the sum of thestories that prevail in the world about us. The stories are not created directly from our intentions
but rather from how others experience us. By having an authentic, articulated operating model toguide our choices and behaviors, we as change agents are investing in our legacy. This interview
provides a template for that investment.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSFrom Performance to
Presence: The Organic
Nature of Learning
and Change
Michael Jones

The boundaries of my language
Are the boundaries of my world.
—Ludwig WittgensteinT

he room lled quickly. Soon the air was thick with the smell of beer and smoke. Noisy
voices drowned out my quiet, thoughtful improvisations. ‘‘What am I doing here?’’ I
asked myself as waiters rushed by, their trays heavy with glasses of cold draft beer.
Looking around at the hard faces, I put aside the idea of playing show tunes. I left out
Chopin and Debussy as well.
It was the third night I had played at this hotel. I absorbed myself in an arrangementof ‘‘Summertime,’’ moving languidly through a progression of dark, minor chords. The
noise in the room seemed faint now, as if it were miles away. I was lost in my own musings
when, suddenly, a glass of beer smashed against the wall near the piano. It was followed
immediately by another. Within moments, the entire room was a brawling mass. I jumped
up, closed the piano lid, stepped off the stage, and walked quickly to the ofces at theback of the hotel. There I met the owner who, taking me  rmly by the arm, said, ‘‘I’m
paying you a buck an hour to keep this room happy. When the room is happy, this does
not happen. Now go back there and play something to cheer up the room!’’ Within moments, I was back at the piano. I played as if my life depended on it! I was a different
piano player after that night: I no longer got lost in the music. Instead, I learned to ‘‘feel’’
the room, and I discovered that as I allowed myself to connect with it, it gave itself backto me. Soon the anonymous surroundings of the place took on an intimate, human face
(Jones, 1995: 85).
In recent conversations with John, a senior vice president of sales and marketing with a
Canadian medical supplies rm, my thoughts returned to that summer I played at thehotel. I rst met John while assisting with a strategy meeting at which 200 of his company’s employees and managers, including the president and senior executive team, engaged in a series of conversations about the highlights of their company’s story andhistory, their current reality, including their hopes and adversities, and possible scenarios
for a creative future. Immediately following this meeting, John had arranged to take his
sales and marketing team—a group of approximately 80 people— to a three-day offsite
national sales meeting. As we later reected on what he had learned from this meeting,John described his own moment of truth when he also needed to ‘‘feel’’ the room:
I had originally planned to take the group through a series of PowerPoint presentations highlighting the  nancial priorities, strategies, and goals for the business over the next year or so.
But it was clear immediately following the  rst meeting that to proceed with my original plan

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Michael Jones
Pianist, composer, speaker,
and educator
Senior Research Fellow
James McGregor Burns Academyof Leadership
University of Maryland
www.pianoscapes.com
michaelj@encode.com

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
q

31

JONESx
From Performance to Presence

simply wouldn’t work. I could no longer hide behind the sales numbers, graphs, or technicalexpertise.
People were too excited and engaged. I knew I needed to drop my plan, but I did not have
any idea what to put in its place. I was new to this group and so I needed to prove myself
and establish who I was. But I knew that what I already knew how to do simply wouldn’t
work.

John knew that he needed both to be ready to step out in front of people and to bewith them—to nd strength in being vulnerable:
I knew that if I could trust in the power of the moment, I would nd a more engaging, creative way of conducting business and that this would guide me in the future. This would be
more challenging, but it would also yield much more than what I already knew of myself as aleader.
What scared me was that I knew that by engaging others in this way, I would no longer
control the outcome of the meeting; I could not foresee where it would lead or what it would
ask of the company’s leadership. And what was most frightening was that because I would
not be reporting from any established body of knowledge or expertise, I would be in a sense
relinquishing my authority to speak.

As John spoke, I re ected on my own experiences as a performing pianist as well asa speaker and facilitator. I remembered how I often have felt challenged to free myself
from the understandings I have held in memory in order to ease into the inner teachingsof the moment. Speaking from memory, which I think of as ‘‘thought speech,’’ assumes
its authority from a body of content and expertise. ‘‘Living speech,’’ on the other hand,reects our thinking and experience as it is made in the moment—including our doubts,
perplexities, questions, aspirations, and fears.
Poet William Stafford suggests that this manner of speaking offers unique challenges:
You start without any authority, if you were a scientist . . . if you were an explorer who hadgone to the moon, if you were a knowing witness about the content being presented . . .
whatever you said would have the force of that accumulated background and information;
and any mumbles, mistakes, dithering could be forgiven as not directly related to any authority you were offering (Stafford, 1978: 62).

32

But for a poet, he adds, ‘‘Whatever you are saying, and however you are saying it,builds its authority from the performance in front of us, or it does not build’’ (Stafford,
1978: 63). This is the unique challenge of a living speech. ‘‘Artists are alive in the presenceof experience,’’ Stafford says. ‘‘This is their job’’ (Stafford, 1986: 68).
This is the new challenge for leaders as well. In a world of accelerating, unexpectedchange, none of us can any longer depend on simply downloading information frommemory, because whatever we might offer on that basis is already out of date. Increasingly, the intuitive insights that will matter most will be those that are living in us now.
It may be that, in the future, all that leaders will have is the now. The courage to capture
the feeling of what is alive now and bring it into words will
make a crucial difference. This is not to imply that the pastis irrelevant. It does suggest that memory is made more vital
when it bene ts from a fresh reading in the context of whatis emerging in the moment.
Perhaps this explains some of the challenges of leadingin the moment. When we make this choice, our formal,
positional authority is inevitably tested. Our primary authority becomes one not based on appointed position, butinstead rooted in the ability to ask the right questions and bring forth a viewpoint thatinspires others and helps them see their own unique gifts and inner strengths. In thissense, what we say matters. Our words somehow count for more in the currency between
us and help determine whether others will share in the courage to bring their own voices
forward. And this is what business needs now: people willing to speak out, to bring to
the fore their unique point of view. Until we speak, we often don’t know what thosewords will be. While perhaps not everyone has the gift of music or ne art with which toexpress him- or herself, we all have within us the possibility of developing a rich auditory
imagination and, with this, the attendant gifts for speaking, listening, and teaching.

This is what business needs now:
people willing to speak out, tobring to the fore their unique pointof view.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSFrom Performance to PresenceThis ‘‘feeling of the moment’’ is often vague and ephemeral, a ash of intuitive insightthat plays at the edge of our conscious awareness. It rarely comes to us complete. While
we may notice its existence at the periphery of our conscious attention, it is dif cult todetermine whether what we are sensing is real or imagined, and so we often consider it
an untrustworthy guide; we disregard its subtle urgings.
At the same time, we are becoming aware that the universe in which we live is notjust a giant clockwork in which everything is predetermined and stored in memory according to some master plan. And, what does reside in memory may not be as superior —or even as relevant—to the moment as these subtle intuitions.
Researcher Valerie Hunt, in describing the world as a collection of interrelated elds,
says:

x

JONES

Listening for the ‘‘Feeling of the Moment’’

The reality of the world lies in  elds which interact with other elds of energy in dynamic
chaos patterns that are always evolving to higher levels of complexity. This is an open system in which reality is tremendously complex. What we know as truth, intuition, and consciousness all operate independently with matter. Furthermore, they transform matter as they
are transformed by it (Hunt, 1989: 49).

A eld may be known by many names: prana, chi, the primary source of being, thecreative matrix, the timeless crossing time, the subtle intelligence of the heart, the intuitive
imagination, the implicate order, the zone, the wave, the quality with no name, or, as one
jazz musician said, in struggling to nd words to describe it precisely, ‘‘a particular kindof love.’’ Anything that attracts feeling or affect, including hunches, questions, sense
impressions, musings, a found silence, or an unexpected encounter of any kind may bringup the ‘‘ eld’’ in which intuition  ourishes.
My rst encounter with this source of invisible intelligence occurred when I was about ve, as I musically accompanied my friends in their orchestration of war games on theliving room rug. As the pianist, I created a soundtrack that
included the drumming of horses’ hooves, cannon shots, andwind rufing the banners. While in the midst of the ‘‘battle,’’I experienced the sensation of not only playing the piano, butalso of being played. This was a profound moment in which
I realized that to create art, I also needed to be open to thepossibility that art creates itself.
Movement teacher Emily Conrad D’aoud once said,‘‘You  nd the wave and you ride it.’’ The day after my  rst
revelation at the piano, I found that wave for two minutes and then lost it. The next day,three minutes—and the next day, nothing at all. Over the years, I have learned that it iseasier to ride the wave when I forget myself. What has made the most difference havebeen the moments when I am able to create in a spirit of true reciprocity with someone
else. In these moments, I have learned the eld exists in relationships, in the space inbetween.
Many who have experienced this creative ‘‘forgetting’’ nd themselves struggling toconnect these somewhat ephemeral moments to the context of the day-to-day realities ofrunning a business. The quantitative pressures of time and deadlines often keep us narrowly focused on the concrete, the speci c, the measurable. Furthermore, the hierarchicalstructure of most business organizations does not often encourage authentic relationships.
Our reward systems usually are based on a model of competition and individual achievement rather than creative collaboration. But as my friend John con ded to me, ‘‘These
ideas connect perfectly for me when I think of the quality time I spend playing the guitar
or preparing a meal, both of which I love to do. We need to  nd a way to balance quantitywith quality.’’Language not only draws on our ability to inform, instruct, or measure, but also has
an intrinsic qualitative ability to inspire and evoke, set the atmosphere or tone, open aspace, reveal a hidden truth, provoke a question, or instill a moment of silence. Does
language have the power to change our reality? Can the words we choose change thestructure of business to produce greater equality and creativity?

Can the words we choose change
the structure of business to
produce greater equality andcreativity?

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Q

Emily Sper

While it may be unrealistic to expect leaders to beartists, we all have an artistic sensibility that is strengthened when we stay connected to our own experience andtrust in our own perceptions. Often this involves staying
the course through the confusion of thoughts that arise
between those moments when we have nothing to say andthe next ones when we do.
Yet perhaps it is precisely in these moments of disorientation that the potential for innovation is most accessible. To restructure organizations for innovation, we alsoneed to accept a certain period of confusion. What may
be occurring, as we give up control based on what we
believe ought to be happening, is the creation of room forwhat is already pressing to happen naturally. Yet giving
ourselves over to this deeper, innate intelligence is what
we usually resist the most. When we shift our attention
from trying to manage or coordinate action to sensing
what is already forming, we open the way for a deeper
pattern of coherence to emerge. Whether in music or
meetings, the basic principle is that creation creates itself.
When we restructure the role of language and giveback to it some of its power to reect on experience, we
also give back to the world some of the beauty and radiance that an imaginative language once held. That is a
primary challenge in articulating. We rarely adjust our listening to hear, or we don’t feel our insights or ideas are
signi cant or digni ed enough to pay attention to. The
posture that prepares us for receiving and articulating is
one of readiness and availability. It involves a shift of mind
from an emphasis on time based on action, usefulness, and results to a creative form oftimeless time, based on thoughts ‘‘found,’’ ideas borrowed, time wasted, and the generativity gleaned in the space between the notes.

Leading in Turbulent Times34

The organizations that will thrive in this new century are those whose leaders recognize
the presence of this ‘‘space’’ and, in response, begin to move from the reductionist, linear,and narrowly disciplined industrial model to a biological model that is more nuanced andpluralistic—and therefore more comfortable with uncertainty, surprise, and constantchange. In an accelerating culture of ‘‘fast knowledge,’’ leaders will be required to respondto a variety of unfolding situations in which the problems are ill de ned, the solutions
vague or unknown, and the appropriate responses untrainable.
In the past, leaders faced problems that were primarily technical in nature. They could
often perform based on their ability to clearly de ne the problems, along with the methods
to apply in the search for solutions to correct them. Now the problems and the solutions
are highly complex and social, revealing themselves as aesthetic, ecological, or spiritualin nature. In this sphere, problems often escape de nition, and the solutions appear unclear or unsolvable.
Interestingly, however, as problems and solutions grow in complexity, so does subtle
intelligence expand to meet them. Leaders need to gain access to our unique human giftfor  nding the threshold between the known and the unknown, through creating spacefor depth and listening, and nding time for reection, openness, discovery, and surprise.
This shift to a new perspective is based more on an ecology of the senses and theuidity of the moment than on  xed structures. It represents the movement towardseeing organizations as luminous, living communities that take nature and the artistic as
their model and, as such, are innitely improvisational, seeing learning and adaptation
as a natural part of ongoing evolution. And, while in the mind’s eye, in this way of seeing
we may have the bene t of purpose, direction, focus, willfulness, action, and clear sight,

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From Performance to Presence

in reality when orienting our listening to the moment, we must also invite ambiguity,
trust, silence, willingness, and risk—qualities that the leader often has been conditioned
to avoid. Faced with this reality, there is a temptation to postpone action for another time
when we may feel more inspired and prepared and also feel faith in the process. Often,
with imaginative thought, we don’t know if we have reached the right place until after
we have arrived.
The experience of feeling the room was an epiphany for John. It represented a fundamental shift of mind in the evolutionary journey from management to leadership. Management spends much of its time reacting to problems and controlling events. Leadershipmeans getting ahead of the problems, and to do this involves thinking about the architecture of space. Only when we have sufcient space do insights for change arise naturally
from within, without the external pressure to perform.
This may mean rethinking meetings and leadership retreats as practice areas for sensing the emergent properties of this invisible intelligence. Leaders rarely have the opportunity to practice this. To do so would involve being attentive to the design, atmosphere,
and texture of the meeting space as well as to the structure and schedule of events. In
this context, speakers would come not only to report on content or expertise but also tobring their own dilemmas, questions, and curiosities into conversations that contributeto ‘‘seeding the space.’’ When our speaking is a form of self-revelation, we are better able
to reect on practice and, in turn, discover the evocative power of language throughlearning to improvise with words. In this way, we can invent new knowledge and insightfor sensing an unknown and turbulent future together, a future whose uncertainty overwhelms us when we try to face it alone.

Myths That Impede Presence
The approach I have outlined here would make perfect sense to an artist. Artists spend
as much as 95% of their time in practice. Through repetition, reection, inquiring, noticing, and questioning, they create a space in which to reveal the rich, intuitive insight andimagery they hold in their minds.1 In this dedicated search for an authentic voice, theyalso know that they are evolving a heightened capacity for
feeling and perception that makes them better able to sense
and articulate possibilities that were not apparent when they
began their work. By contrast, in most organizations, there
is little time for thoughtful preparation, inquiry, or rehearsal. Most people spend as much as 95% of their time
performing. Everything is done on ‘‘real’’ time.
This preoccupation with performance sets time as the adversary. Instead of being
absorbed in time, busyness becomes a strategy for trying to defeat the violent pressure of
the clock. This has led to certain myths about what constitutes organizational priorities
that often serve as impediments to the authentic expression of one’s own voice. These
are more than beliefs; they represent the deep structures that compose the cultural story
in which we live. And, because they move in sympathetic vibration with one another,each reinforces the other by what we do and say. There are four central myths that impede
performance, or presence.

Busyness becomes a strategy fortrying to defeat the violent
pressure of the clock.

1. The Myth of the Ultimate Truth
With this myth, we are given to believe that there is a single right answer to anything.
Behind this belief is the prevailing fear that if others don’t conform to our answer, chaos
will occur. Anything that cannot (or will not) be questioned or challenged—including
mission statements, budgetary processes, policies, or practices—tends to move fromguideline to edict to ultimate truth. This myth also tends to promote exclusive ‘‘clubs’’
through the development of accrediting bodies and professional associations, which inturn become isolated by adopting a language code that others cannot decipher. In accepting this myth as true, we also give up our own voice to experts and specialists throughfeelings of personal inadequacy or simply believing that we are somehow not quali ed to
speak. In this way, we allow others to de ne us.

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From Performance to Presence

For a musician who accepts this myth, the ultimate truth may be in the way he or
she performed the composition yesterday; for the corporate manager, it may well be lastyear’s sales gures or the standards outlined in company policy documents. To this wayof thinking, whatever we hold in memory and act on without question becomes the ultimate truth.

2. The Myth of Separation
In this myth, we objectify the world, and by doing so, we see the world not as a naturalextension of life but as a resource. Canadian philosopher George Grant describes theprocess of objecti cation: ‘‘Object means literally . . . summonsing of something before
us . . . so that it is forced to give its reasons for the way it is as an object’’ (Grant, 1986:36). When we try to force movement toward predetermined goals or ends or force imaginative hunches and echoes to stand up to the cold light of experimental analysis, something of the inner life fades away. By separating ourselves from nature’s organic andconsistent cycles of growth and decay, we also become disconnected from the inner senseof union with the larger dimensions of a life of which we are a natural part. It takes aconscious commitment to reconnect these severed rhythms.
John, for example, said that in planning his sales meeting, he decided at the lastminute to shift the location from a sunny resort in Mexico to a potentially snowboundlocation in the heart of Quebec. He believed that it was important that the group not rush
to the airport to catch an airplane but instead take the train. The experience, of traveling
together—of slowing the pace, enjoying the scenery, listening to live music, and having
time to deepen their conversation—nourished their sense of common connection.
John recognized that what changes people is beauty. When we slow our pace, we
also widen our span of perception to see the familiarity of the world and business throughfresh eyes. His approach yielded creative results that no one could have predicted.

3. The Myth of Efciency

36

This myth implies that it is possible— and even preferable—to bring all of life’s unruly
elements under our direct control. The fear in this instance is that everything is up to us;
if we don’t use planning and force to hold it all together, everything will spin out of control.
In John’s case, he sensed the excitement and enthusiasm of those coming to themeeting as soon as he changed the location. In turn, he altered his plan to accommodate
larger possibilities— but not before the intensity of the feeling in the room taxed his own
inner capacity to respond. This kind of courageous work often stretches us beyond theef ciency of our best corporate instincts.
As soon as John shifted his orientation to the larger space around him, he was given
his words. They were drawn directly from the thought that emerged in the space between
him and the group. This reality of spontaneous creation is a reminder that we do notcontrol anything. Instead, by directing our attention in a way that includes the sense of‘‘otherness’’—which may be another person, a group, or an organization (or, for an artist,a keyboard, a canvas, or a tree)—we open sufcient space for insights to ow.

4. The Myth of Scarcity
In this myth, we believe that creative ability and original thought are narrowly distributed.
For one person to win, therefore, another must lose. This myth is grounded in the fundamental belief that the world is a battleground and, as such, is capricious and hostile.
We forget that, while the growth of human consciousness is dependent on certain reasonable limits, we live in an ever-expanding universe. Collective intelligence is augmented, not diminished, by the creative demands we place on it.
When John re ected on the results of the meeting, what he most remembered was
how simple it turned out to be. ‘‘It seemed counterintuitive,’’ he observed. ‘‘There is such
cultural stress on having access to factual information, on being logical, linear, and clear.
I had to let go of all of that. And when I did, the concerns I had about taking this leapof faith actually proved groundless. There seemed to be a convergence of forces andVolume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSJONESx
From Performance to Presence
Q

Gene Beytserendipitous events that would have been too complex to have been arranged for orplanned in advance.’’
Each of these myths is based on a basic fear of life. Perhaps they educated us for the
Industrial Age to protect us from the irrational impulses of the imagination, when mechanistic and practical thinking became expedient. Unfortunately, in separating us from theimagination, they also inhibited our access to a vast eld of intelligence, which is home
for imaginative thought.
The myth of ultimate truth, for example, is based in fear of uniqueness, diversity,and the legitimacy of our own viewpoints. The myth of separation is based in fear of theworld and disconnects us from a sense of belonging and the love of place that brings
beauty and radiance to language. The myth of efciency locks us in a world of order andstructure that causes us to mistrust the spontaneity of the spoken word. The myth ofscarcity has contributed to language becoming an instrument for struggle and competition.
We forget that if we can discover an expressive language that is adequate to our own
thought, then language can be a source of abundance and we can once again be heartfelt
with words.
37

Changing the Light by Which We Live
Crossing the threshold from performance to practice will necessitate a shift of focus fromthe development of the intellect to an opening of the heart. While our mental models andknowledge may have helped us develop a discipline of the intellect, most of us have notyet cultivated an intelligence of the heart. As John saw in his meeting, when we try to
respond to the complexity of cultural, social, spiritual, and ecological issues that are apart of any creative community, the intellect is easily lost without the guidance of an
inspired, dedicated heart.
Joseph Chilton Pierce says that ‘‘creative discovery . . . arises from the coupling of
the intellect’s passion with the deep intuitive and unfathomable mystery of the heart.
Should the intellect win its battle with heart’s intelligence,’’ he warns, ‘‘then the war will
be lost for all of us. We will be just an experiment that failed’’ (Pierce, 1992: xx).
The  rst steps toward integration involve restoring those qualities of the imaginationthat serve to awaken the heart: courage, receptivity, connection, spontaneity, presence,feeling, reection, and story.2 I remember the autumn many years ago when my partner
Judy and I started a journey to nd this integration in our own minds and hearts. It beganwith the decision to sell our city home, close our consulting practices temporarily, buy a

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

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From Performance to Presence

small motor home, and travel for a while. One day, a friend, sensing our struggle as we
tried to map out our trip in detail, said to us, ‘‘This is a wonderful opportunity to travelwith a candle rather than a ashlight.’’ This simple reframing—to alter the means ofnding our way—changed our perspective. To nd our way out of the impasse by whichthese myths have stopped us, we also need a different form of illumination. We need tochange the light by which we live.
The light of a  ashlight blinds us, effectively blocking our ability to feel and sense
our way. The language is often too subtle and its volume too low for it to be detected in
the glaringly illuminated, fast-knowledge world. Artists often speak of the passage throughthe dark night to explain how they learned to read the geography of the imagination.
Leaders must also work now to navigate across an unknown, uncharted sea. Candlelightslows us down, its opaque light bringing into view subtle forms in the shadows that willserve as a new signpost to mark our way.
Leaders who recognize the power of words as signposts for creating our reality arewilling to take the risk to dig deep for that ‘‘something extra’’ that even they cannot
predict, because they don’t know that it is there until it appears. In so doing, they fulll
the original role of the speaker who stands at the threshold, making the invisible visible.
With organic leadership, change can begin with one word. For John, that word was
nourishment. It served as the signpost that guided him in introducing structures and processes that would bring sustenance to those he served. In this respect, words hold value
not only for their own sake but because they lead us to those images that stand behindlanguage, including a reclaiming of our uniqueness, a revival of relationships, and therestoring of our sense of place. In this space, we are free to be at play with words. Throughlanguage, we again come into intimate relationship with the timeless human desire fordepth, discovery, presence, and surprise. As we make ahome for ourselves in language, we also open the space forthe innate intelligence to come to help us fulll its deeper
purposes. In this context, a community’s gift for learning
through articulation is not only to devise strategy, develop
business plans, resolve conicts, or solve problems, but also
to create new and unexpected synergies through the reimagining of an evocative language that elevates the subtle
intelligence of the heart. This in turn equips us to foreseeand even shape the future by recognizing the emergence of new patterns of relationship,
acting coherently together.
Just as artists commit to living a dedicated life, organizations and communities need
to be intent on nding their collective voices and on furthering the work of language tolead us. We also need words that serve as beacons for navigating across an unknown
sea—words that expand the boundaries of our world and whose quest for meaning draws
us into a reective frame of mind. Living speech will of necessity be a language of theheart in which words such as forthrightness, vulnerability, humility, generosity, gratitude,
silence, affection, obedience, grace, and reciprocity will take on a new currency. The words
we choose must be our own. We choose them because we have discovered, and arelearning to live by, the unheard melody behind the word. Poet William Stafford writes:

Through language, we again comeinto intimate relationship with thetimeless human desire for depth,
discovery, presence, and surprise.

38

And so I appeal to a voice, to something
shadowy.
a remote important region in all who talk:though we could fool each other, we should
consider—lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in thedark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,or a breaking line may discourage them back tosleep;
the signals we give —yes or no, or maybe—should be clear: the darkness around us is deep (Stafford, 1993: 135).

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From Performance to Presencex

I last talked with John in midsummer following a sequence of strategy meetings. We
were challenged to  nd even two words to describe the different qualities of silence that
had emerged in the group conversations during their strategy conference. Just as the Inuit
have more than 15 words to describe snow, we also need a language that will describe
the many different qualities of silence and authenticity, of courage and love.
Silence answered us that evening. With it, we touched a memory that, for centuries,
we met by the  re—not as managers, executives, employees, or consultants—but asstorytellers, teachers, and enchanters. Our voices served as the light in the darkness. Our
work is now, as it was then, through the simple pleasure of thinking and listening, toalign ourselves with this ow of creative energy. In a world that is so much with us, it isimportant that our voices be clear. To this desire to be truly known by means of a languageof one’s own, we must once again make our appeal.

Notes
1. Please also see M. Jones and J. Shibley. ‘‘Practicing Relevance.’’ in The Dance of Change, eds.
P. Senge, A. Kleiner, C. Roberts, R. Ross, G. Roth, and B. Smith (New York: Currency Doubleday,
1999): 190; and M. Jones. ‘‘Work As a Vocation and Practice.’’ Leverage (Waltham, MA: Pegasus
Communications, March 2000, no. 39): 1.
2. Each of these steps on the journey deserves its own consideration and will be the subject of acoming essay.

References
Grant, G. Technology and Justice (Concord, Ontario: House of Anansi Press, 1986).
Hunt, V. In nite Mind, The Science of Human Vibrations (Malibu, CA: Malibu Publishing Co., 1989).
Jones, M. Creating an Imaginative Life (Berkeley, CA: Conari Press, 1995).
Pierce, J.C. Preface. Evolution’s End: Claiming the Potential of Our Intelligence (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
Stafford, W. Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on a Writer’s Vocation (Ann Arbor, MI: Universityof Michigan Press, 1978).
Stafford, W. You Must Revise Your Life (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1986).
Stafford, W. (The Estate of). The Darkness Around Us Is Deep: The Selected Poems of William Stafford(New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

Commentaryby Lara L. Nuer and Shayne Hughes
Michael Jones has raised his candle to the night sky, illuminating an uncertain but crucial path
toward a more creative, caring space of human consciousness in which we are more than justlinear thinkers focusing on results. In this space, we can search for resources hidden within us,
expand our sense of the other, and deepen our ability to give to and ‘‘feel the moment.’’ Jones
seeks eloquently to jog our thinking on how we can more fully draw on our inner resources andhuman experience in those murky places in life that we have not gured out— to nd clarity
through centered perseverance.
Jones addresses the essence of the internal barriers confronting today’s leaders. He declares
the need for the forthright expression of doubts, vulnerabilities, questions, and concerns. Today’s
business world is plagued by a crop-threatening drought of real dialogue in which to share thecore issues that fundamentally touch us. In reading articles, essays, and books, it is unclear what
executives and managers on the front line of business can actually apply. How can they transform
this gurative candle into a guiding practice that can help them every day? As a rst step, wemust search for our own personal barriers: our fears, our judgments, our unquestioned mental
models. How do we project and perpetuate these into our environment, creating unsafe spacesthat then justify our silence? What are our practical leverage points?
This question is a challenge to each of us to close the gap between intellectual clarity andpractical application. T.S. Eliot once penned (1964):

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 339

Lara L. Nuer
Principal
Learning as Leadershiplaran@learnaslead.com
Shayne Hughes
Principal
Learning as Leadershipshayneh@learnaslead.com

JONESx
From Performance to Presence

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

What are the specic faces and nuances of our own shadow barriers? What blocks us, in the here
and now, from taking that apparent leap from the cliff that is really only a step off a curb? Claire
Nuer, a pioneer in the eld of personal mastery and the founder of Learning as Leadership’s1 methodology, devoted her life to developing tools to illuminate these areas. If we cannot readily name,albeit with discomfort, what these shadow barriers are for ourselves, then we are squandering vast
personal potential in the very areas that Jones is pointing us toward.
Another important point in this immense gray zone of leadership is feeling the moment. This
primarily emotional discipline is extremely difcult for us because we have been taught to shove
our emotions down. They need to be raised to the surface because they carry precious gems of
information: intuition, perspective, concerns, reactions, and mental models. In learning to identify
and to sort through these emotionally charged elements, we can learn to put them to the serviceof our endeavors, enhancing this ‘‘feel the moment’’ skill. As Jones indicates, our fear of performance is an additional barrier to this organic process; but when we do not acknowledge this ensemble of emotional tremblings, they drive our behavior and decision making without ourknowledge. We have no choice but to grow in this direction.
Once again, there is the problem of application:x How do we let the moment unfold without falling into chaos?

x How do we trust our perceptions without clinging to our righteousness?

x How do we bring our emotions to the surface without using them to override those of others?
The danger in this practice—and we saw it play itself out in the ‘‘self-emergence’’ movement a few
years ago— is that it demands relinquishing control without relinquishing structure, and there isoften a great confusion on this point. In our experience, our ability to ‘‘feel the moment’’ andspontaneously and creatively let something more powerful occur depends greatly on our level of
preparation and structure. Is our platform so solid that we can leap off it into the unknown, trusting that we have the foundation to which to return? The difference between Jones’s wonderfulimprovisational musings on the piano and the unpleasant noise one of us would make were we to
try to play in his stead lies in decades of practice, discipline, and mastery. In a business context,
this means meeting agendas, researched groundwork, thought-out processes—all so that we havethe freedom, if we feel it in the moment, to let the magic of being human unfold.

Note
40

1. Through workshops and coaching, Learning as Leadership partners with companies, governmental agencies,
universities, and individuals to help them implement their goals, accomplish large projects, and create sustainable change in their organizations and themselves.

Reference
Eliot, T.S. ‘‘The Hollow Men.’’ Collected Poems 1909— 1962 (New York: Harcourt; London: Faber and Faber,1964).

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSStory, Poetry,
and Metaphor:
Subjective Solutionsfor Subjective Problems
Annette SimmonsDespite a few weak smiles, the senior managers’ faces displayed mostly anxiety or
aggression. Their jaws tensed and released. The CEO shook my hand a little too hard.
I stood before 33 post-merger survivors surrounding a U-shaped table. When the CEO
introduced me as ‘‘a young lady from North Carolina,’’ I winced. This ‘‘merger of equals’’
was not going well. The CEO clearly saw the dilemma as ‘‘us versus them’’ and consideredme (hired by the chairman of the board) one of ‘‘them.’’ His sabotage of the process had
begun in earnest. Military metaphors like ‘‘necessary losses’’ and ‘‘taking a bullet’’ hadplaced lines of demarcation and created an impasse. I needed a story to create some grayin their black-and-white world.
I want to tell you about my dog, Larry. Larry is a greyhound. I adopted him from the racetrack. You know, they kill the dogs that don’t win, if no one adopts them. Larry didn’t know
how to be a pet when he came to live with me. He had never seen a bone before and chased
it all over the backyard until he made the intellectual leap that if he’d hold it down with hispaws, it would stay still. He has never learned—and shows no sign of learning— that when
he is on the leash and he walks on one side of a telephone pole and I walk on the other, wearen’t going anywhere. Larry just looks up at me with his puzzled dog face. You know, I
could tell him all day to back up, but he’s not going to back up until I back up. Once I backup, he follows. Only then, can we disentangle ourselves and move on.

There are a few smiles, nods, and some cut their eyes to meet others’ across the room.
One guy uncrossed his arms. They know I am not talking about my dog, Larry. Only astory could simultaneously address all positions. The Larry story connects to a universal
human experience. It offers an opportunity for introspection about personal responsibility
without pointing  ngers. It gets their attention. And it might have earned me a few points
for being a nice enough person to adopt a greyhound. I would even suggest that it offereda healing touch to hidden fear over the fate of those who don’t win. Story and metaphor
are powerful for anyone hoping to shift a group’s perceptions quickly. I’ve told the Larry
story dozens of times. Others have borrowed the story. It is a gem. Told well, a story canshoot past defenses and get to the heart of a matter. Better still, it can prompt introspection
within the privacy of a listener’s mind without risking public admission of error.
What is a story? It is a narration of a sequence of events that simulates a visual,sensory, and emotional experience that feels signi cant for both the listener and the teller.
If experience is the best teacher, then a story is second best. Bullet points on a
PowerPoint screen are dead, inanimate representations of someone else’s conclusions. A
story has the power to breathe real-life experience into charts, tables, numerical analysis,
and statistics so listeners can see, hear, and feel enough of an alternative perspective forit to become real. Once an idea or initiative feels real in their imagination, people are

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Annette Simmons
President, Group Process Consulting
AnnetteGPC@aol.com
www.groupprocessconsulting.com

41

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
qSIMMONSx
Story, Poetry, and Metaphor

much more likely to do what it takes to make it real in the physical world. No matter how
smart your conclusions seem to you, they are still yours, not theirs.
Reporting your conclusions sets up an either-or situation that creates too much competitive tension. A story
makes people think backward and then forward again
through the experience of your story in a way that prompts
their own new conclusions, which they will value much
more highly than your conclusions. In addition, a really
good story has the power to connect humans to their emotions and access deep, shared wisdom that lies beneath language. Many people are making bad decisions because they
simply don’t have the time to think deeply. A story is a way to create or reawaken ‘‘common’’ sense (that is, shared meaning that works).

A really good story has the power
to connect humans to theiremotions and access deep, sharedwisdom that lies beneath language.

PoetryPerfectionists and idealists often turn to cynicism as a defense. Because these are usually
the best and the brightest, releasing them from the tyranny of self-criticism also decreases
cynicism. However, an objective description of the detrimental effects of self-limiting beliefs is, in equal parts, accurate and ineffective when compared to reading Mary Oliver’s
poem, ‘‘Wild Geese’’ (1992: 110).
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting . . .

Poetry and story have the power to shine a light into dark places and shift the emotional receptivity of a group in a way that redirects the  ow of their thoughts—in thiscase, away from old self-defeating loops toward new thinking that can lead to new solutions. Reading a poem is like listening to music that changes how we feel long enough tond a fresh perspective on a day that has been downhill since breakfast. Our perspective
pops from seeing the old lady to seeing the young woman, the vase instead of two faces,
or any of the other perspective-popping drawings you might remember. This ickering ofperceptual perspective gives people new choices when they are stuck; it gives them accessto their own creative intelligence and wisdom. It opens doors. Poetry is a tool that induces
perceptual agility so people can begin to learn how to do it for themselves.

But How Do You Sell It?

42

None of this sounds like the sure thing that a client wants you to promise before she shells
out x amount of money and two days of her top performers’ executive time. I can see asenior manager’s brow furrow at ‘‘perceptual agility’’ or ‘‘shifting the emotional state’’and imagine the theme music from ‘‘The Twilight Zone’’ playing in the background of
his mind.
Reconnecting people to their wisdom or common sense is dif cult to explain in objective terms. Articulating an agenda or de ning outcomes for a highly subjective process
is difcult when the client (or the client’s boss) has not yet experienced (or still doesn’t
trust) the unpredictable nature of subjective solutions. The tyranny of agendas, objective
measures, and outcomes has distorted our ability to do good work.
Objective criteria distract us from tending to the subjective aspects of organizational
life. Recently, some federal judges, the clerk of court, and staff people held a dialogue todiscuss the spotty implementation of their new IT system. Focus on implementation plans,‘‘accountability’’ systems, and follow-up had failed to increase compliance. After getting
permission to talk about subjective issues, they discussed, for almost two hours, who says
hello in the morning. One particularly formal-looking judge (no one dared address her byher rst name) burst out, ‘‘Well, no one says hello to me!’’ The shocked looks were
testament to the fact that no one had dreamed that she cared. Was this dialogue relevant?
Only when you interpret that saying hello in the morning was operating as a metaphorfor ‘‘respect’’ in this group; the IT system had been held up by people who had decided
they had no intention of cooperating with anyone who did not show them enough respect

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSSIMMONS
Story, Poetry, and Metaphorx

to say ‘‘hello.’’ After this dialogue, people started saying
hello in the court hallways, and the implementation of theIT system proceeded much more smoothly.
Many groups suffer from untended subjective issues
invisible to objective criteria and quantitative analysis. Objective, analytical methods make subjective truths disappear before they can be tended. This accounts for meetings
at which a group talks for hours and never talks about thereal problem.
It’s not only problems that disappear with objective,
quantiable criteria, but many of the solutions too. Most of
us think kittens are cute, right? But trying to produce cuteas a measurable outcome is like cutting a kitten in half to
examine the quantiable inputs that create cute. In manycases, our analysis destroys the very thing we seek to understand. Subjective methodologies such as story, poetry,and metaphor cannot survive intact when subjugated toobjective criteria or agendas. I sigh when corporate storytellers try to provide linear recipes by crafting outcomebased stories. The result is a bizarre, mechanical kitten thatlooks like a kitten, sounds like a kitten, costs a hell of a lot
more than a real kitten, and falls way short of being eithercute or engaging (although it never poops, you don’t haveto feed it, and you are guaranteed to get the same result
every time). Stories that result from this 1, 2, 3 linear recipe
approach are almost always boring and patronizing.

Objective versus Subjective Reality
Objective thinking routines introduce a terrible alchemy tosubjective truths that transform gold into lead. I try to preempt these thinking routines with a model that protects subjective truths long enough fora group to tend to issues that need tending (see table 1). This model has accelerated both
(1) permission to introduce story, metaphor, and dialogue, and (2) the transfer of story,
metaphor, and dialogue skills. The model reduces defensiveness, builds credibility, andpreempts the ‘‘tried that, didn’t work’’ responses that high achievers sometimes place on
this soft stuff. It takes about 10 minutes to deliver.
We already know that no matter how right a plan is by objective measures, if people
don’t accept it—if they simply don’t like it at a subjective, emotional level —it’s not goingto succeed. We spend hours on cost-bene t analysis, information  ow, and system architecture (doing real work) and come up with the perfect
new compensation structure, but if people don’t like it, it
won’t happen. The quality of the decision is dependent on
the quality of the acceptance of that decision. We intuitively
know subjective truths have a profound impact on our success. What we don’t seem to know is what to do about it.
Objective truths have been elevated over subjective truths
for so long that we tend to label the time spent making theright decision as real work and the time spent on subjective
issues as something less.
Neglecting the soft stuff is bad enough, but tending to the soft stuff with objective
tools built for real work is like carving coffee cups with a jackhammer. Or building avalue-based organization by passing out laminated cards.
Lightening-fast mental routines embedded in us by a well-meaning educational system overrely on objective criteria to tell us what is true and what is false, to the extent
that we inadvertently discard our natural-born understanding of vital subjective truths
such as trust and loyalty. Because objective truth is either 100% true or it is false, after
one failure, the entire principle is discarded. One jerk and some people never again trust

Q

Emily Sper

Tending to the soft stuff with
objective tools built for real work
is like carving coffee cups with ajackhammer.

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

43

SIMMONSx
Story, Poetry, and Metaphor

44

Table 1 Objective versus subjective reality
Objective reality

Subjective reality

Quality of decision —a decision or plan
derived from objective facts, cost-bene t,
documented need (real work)

Quality of acceptance—decision or plan
people like and want to implement (softstuff)

Things are either 100% true or they are
false (test the hypothesis; if it fails, discard the hypothesis)

Nothing is 100% true or works 100%of the time; if a process works 50% to
70% of the time, that’s as good as it
gets

Scientic method and root cause analysis

Kittens (Cute ? 1/2 `FactsFeelings

Leadership competencies— exibility,
consistency, decisiveness, inclusivenessReal-leader stories (that is, awed human beings who change their minds
and at times make decisions without
input)

Bullet points or charts

Metaphors, poetry, stories

Accuracy (derived from rational analysis)

Faith (often beyond rational evidence)

External proof (you can prove it is true)

Internal experience (you can’t prove it;
you just know it is true)

1/2)

senior management. One betrayal and they never leave a subordinate’s work unchecked.
But subjective truths are subjective. Even when a subjective truth is true only 70% of thetime (that is, ‘‘employees left alone will do the best work they can’’), it doesn’t make ita half-truth. Consider the subjective strategies you use to create inspiration, courage, or
integrity in your own life, for instance. There will be times when the theme to ‘‘Rocky’’ares your nostrils and gives you energy, and there will be times when it makes you
smirk. Trusting subjective truths that may let you down 30% to 50% of the time is better
than discarding these truths and reverting to systems designed for worst-case scenarios.
Many a manager who has suffered the nightmare of facilitating a decision from agroup that can’t even agree on what to order for lunch has rejected the subjective truththat group input creates better decisions. She stops trustingthat principle because, by objective standards, she ran anexperiment and the principle failed. She decides that making the decision herself and pretending to get group input
is a much better strategy. (If your mind is saying, ‘‘Well,that just means she didn’t have good consensus-building
skills,’’ let me say rst, ‘‘Duh!’’ and second, ‘‘This is exactly
how inquiry and learning about subjective issues stop before they get started.’’)Subjective issues are also resistant to our habit of looking for a root cause to the
problem. Many groups reveal that lack of trust is a problem. Unfortunately, looking forthe root cause of this particular issue invariably turns into a ‘‘Whose fault is it?’’ blame
game that accelerates defensive reasoning. Counterintuitive as it may feel, examining root
cause on trust issues will usually make things worse. Subjective problems respond muchbetter to subjective tools and solutions.

Because objective truth is either
100% true or it is false, after one
failure, the entire principle isdiscarded.

Metaphor
Change what people see and feel, and their behavior will change accordingly. When lackof communication is the problem, it is safe to assume each individual is operating withan untold story about who or what contributes to this lack of communication. As long as
these stories—founded on negative assumptions about people who don’t care, are incompetent, or are overly self-interested—remain hidden, they are untouched by a more balanced, collective story.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSSIMMONS
Story, Poetry, and Metaphorx

Few senior managers will admit to their staff that they ‘‘feel alone and afraid,’’ but ametaphor drawing of a ladder that’s too short to get to the table and getting shorter due
to the efforts of a group of stick gures with chain saws can express those feelings. The
branch managers who assumed this senior manager was sucking up to the CEO insteadof representing their interests can now see more than they saw before; the metaphor gives
a glimpse into his inner experience. When you increase a group’s ability to see their boss’s
internal struggle and positive intent, you will change the way they treat him, the effort
they make to communicate with him, and the support they offer.
Metaphor has the potential to disable negative judgment and jumping to solutions
long enough for individual perceptions to intermingle, cross-pollinate, and stretch to include a bigger picture.1 The branch managers show their metaphor maps—a train withsquare wheels, a boot that threatens to crush their good intentions, and a road map that
leads to a dead end. These negative, subjective feelings have had no other place forexpression, so they festered. Once expressed, they lose their sting. They even become
laughable. The sharing of metaphor maps usually gets a group laughing, a subjective
source of healing and creativity that beats the hell out of any other intervention techniqueI’ve ever seen. Laughter is a solvent for negative emotions.
Getting a bunch of objective thinkers to draw metaphor pictures requires stealth. I
hide the markers and the paper until we need them. Before resistance can build, I present
sample metaphor maps, explain the task, and give people ve minutes to draw a metaphorof the current dynamics of their group or organization. As hidden beliefs about the futilityof communication or cooperation are revealed, they are simultaneously reframed by seeing others’ hidden beliefs. Sure, only 50% to 70% of the maps provide insight, but in agroup of 10 or 40, that is a lot of insight.
Insight pops at several points. Sometimes, it happens when a person looks at his or
her own map (a long line of new hires being sucked up into the whirling organizational
tornado, with bodies ung all over, some out the top). Sometimes, it happens by seeing
others’ maps (bailing out a sinking boat). And sometimes, it occurs in the conversationthat follows (‘‘I just got back from the Gulf War, and if I’m not drinking powdered milk
and I can kiss my kids goodnight, this ain’t that bad’’). Ultimately, each individual’s
metaphor enters the collective memory of the group unabridged and begins to create an
opportunity for a new group metaphor to emerge. Con icting truths that cannot be reconciled in a true-false framework reconcile more easily within the ‘‘two sides of a coin’’
framework of metaphor.

Q

Emily Sper

45

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

SIMMONS
Story, Poetry, and Metaphorx

Objective criteria force us to choose sides on issues such as whether last year’s performance was good or bad. Metaphors allow the complexity of ‘‘it depends on how you
look at it’’ to be expressed. It may have been a good year nancially, but all the deadbodies tell another story. You can feel the pop of recognition that occurs when people
begin to understand that they each have a different piece of the same damn picture. They
don’t actually disagree; they were just using different de nitions of good.
Businesspeople trained to deliver a problem description via objective language lose
the subjective content. If a manager describes the last reorganization as demonstrating alack of communication, when she really means, ‘‘I feel like I’m being treated like a rat ina cage,’’ we lose the ability to tend to the real problem. We need tools to reveal thesubjective issues behind rational descriptions. Argyris’s ‘‘left-hand column’’ exercise
promises access to the unspoken, but, in practice, this wonderful tool doesn’t work as
fast or as effectively as metaphor (1990). Smart executives mangle the intent and manufacture lightening-fast resistance to the awareness the left-hand column offers. We needtools that reveal the subconscious before the conscious has a chance to disable it withlogic. We need tools that help us laugh at ourselves and give us permission to stop pretending that we are something we are not.

Conclusion
Recently, a group of PhD physicists and engineers took the objective-subjective truth
model further than I expected: ‘‘You realize that quantum physics moves even objective
reality over to the subjective side, don’t you?’’ I said, ‘‘Yeah, but that is a little too scary,
don’t you think?’’ We just both smiled and moved on.
It’s all in how you look at it.

Note
1. For metaphor map drawings and further guidance on facilitating the process, see www.
groupprocessconsulting.com.

References
Argyris, C. Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning (Boston: Allyn& Bacon, 1990).
Oliver, M. New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

Commentary46

by Judy Sorum Brown

Judy Sorum Brown
Author, educator, poet
JudyBrown@aol.com

Annette Simmons helped me better understand some of my own experiences with leaders, withgroups, and as a poet. As she suggests, an overreliance on analytical methodologies causes certain
persistent and important problems to disappear from the organizational radar screen.
Perhaps the dynamic of the analytical approach making invisible certain central subjective realities suggests why people nd it hard to settle into dialogue and storytelling. Even when they
think storytelling might be a path to deeper understanding, in comparison with the familiar andactive analytic approach, the subjective approach leaves people feeling as if nothing is getting
done. Perhaps people can’t stand the feeling, invoked by being with an image of complex reality,that nothing is being ‘‘xed.’’ They pop themselves out of the subjective mode and back into theanalytical.
Simmons suggests ways that the subjective analysis of subjective reality opens important
pathways to understanding. I think I’ve intuitively understood this, as perhaps have many practitioners (and that’s perhaps why dialogue, language, poetry, and the creative processes have foundtheir way to the heart of my practice and that of many colleagues). But Simmons’s description ofthis dynamic gives me a clearer way of holding what I’ve intuitively known and enables me tocommunicate my understanding in more straightforward ways.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSSIMMONS
Story, Poetry, and Metaphorx

She also suggests something about the enduring power of a good story: her story about Larry
the dog is powerful, I suspect, because given its multiple nuances, shadings, and meanings, it remains
powerful for her. Michael Jones, the Canadian composer and pianist, and I have mused often about
the persistent power of certain stories, such as that of the man who asked him, ‘‘If you don’t playyour compositions, who in the universe will?’’ This story continues to have power because thestoryteller, Jones, is still learning from the story. Thus, a story functions most powerfully as inquiry,
as offering, rather than as lesson. The process is akin to sitting beside someone who is telling thestory around a campre as we listen in the dark.
Stories and images of all kinds, including poetry, let us consider something in the privacy of
our hearts and spirits, without the pressure to be accountable or decide. And we are able to placethat story next to our own story for consideration. Sometimes, by some mystery, from that consideration comes a natural shift of understanding that creates a new, healthier perception. That perception cannot be forced but is wholly invitational, voluntary, personal, and inner.
Simmons suggests how an image or a story can become what educator and author Parker
Palmer calls ‘‘the third thing’’ in our midst, something we can all look at and from which we canweave a rich set of meanings in dialogue with our colleagues (1998). It creates a fuller, richer conversation about things that matter and a fresh territory for exploration and self-disclosure.

Reference
Palmer, P. The Courage to Teach (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).

Commentary
by Ipek Kursat
Story, poetry, and metaphor are lost territories in Western culture. Annette Simmons reclaims agood deal of the ground with admirable lucidity. As she points out, our overreliance on objectivity
has displaced the subjective, and tools that evoke the subjective, as a legitimate part of our experience: if you call something a ‘‘fairy tale’’ or remark that someone is telling you a good story, youhave delivered an insult. Many of us are cautiously stepping forward to reclaim our subjective experience as legitimate. However, we tend to be careful to sidestep the dreaded ‘‘touch-feely’’ label.
When I read Simmons’s claim that objective tools are inherently limited, though, I wonder if
we are moving toward the other side of an either-or paradigm, when we should be looking forways to include more of our experience as thinking, feeling, sensing, and knowing creatures. Our
subjective, intuitive capacity and our rational, objective side are complementary. The former deepens. The latter allows outlines to emerge from the depths. I agree that a root-cause analysis on
trust issues is a bad idea, but I have used the tool to reect on stories that my coaching clientsand I live out repeatedly in our lives. I might ask, for example, ‘‘If this pattern that I keep encountering were branches on a tree, what story or map of reality would be its trunk? What core beliefs
constitute the roots that support the trunk?’’ This is one example of the way we can blend theobjective and the metaphoric to focus reection and facilitate transition to action.
The issue of results is another point on which I may hold a different perspective. As a consultant, my primary responsibility is the outer world: Is there a positive business impact from mywork? Are people acting differently ? Are they more effective? I do reective practice because I
expect to see a difference in the way I live as a result. When I show up as a consultant, what
differences does my client want to see? As Simmons suggests, direct, positive impacts from subjective methods are difcult to measure. But what we need to measure are, ultimately, business andperformance impacts. We could, for example, hypothesize that teams that use nonrational tools
such as story and metaphor to diagnose problems are more productive over the course of the project than teams that do not. We can then develop and track measures of productivity, inquire into
organizational factors that enhance or dampen the ‘‘story effect,’’ and so on. Simmons herself doesthat in her story about IT implementation, albeit informally and after the fact.
Finally, I hope I can shed a bit more light on what makes a real, live, cuddly kitten and amechanical ‘‘Frankencat.’’ For several years, I studied with Paula Underwood, an Iroquois Keeper of
Old Things, who taught me about the anatomy of a learning story. A traditional learning story—

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Ipek Kursat
Individual, Group, andOrganizational Coachkursat@shaysnet.com

47

SIMMONSx
Story, Poetry, and Metaphor

one that belongs to a community and is designed and passed on from generation to generation—
has rather specic elements. These are the circle, the triangle, cadence, and an open loop for continuing inquiry. An example is this opening from ‘‘Who Speaks for Wolf,’’ a learning story from
Underwood’s tradition.
Almost at the edge of the circle of light cast by Central Fire, Wolf was standing. His eyes reected there’s warmth with a colder light. Wolf stood there, staring at the re. A boy of eight winters was watching Wolf, as immobile as Wolf, as fascinated. Finally, the boy turned to Grandfather, warming his oldbones from winter’s rst chill.

The story begins with a circle of light and the triangle of Wolf, the boy, and Grandfather. Wolf
stands almost at the edge of the circle of light, an image that hints at hidden things beyond in thenight, inviting our imagination to expand the circle. We also learn something about each character
that makes him individual. Wolf’s eyes reect the re’s warmth with a colder light. The boy is eight.
Grandfather is feeling winter’s chill in his old bones. The triangle creates a strong foundation forthe story, enabling us to explore the circle and what lies beyond.
‘‘Who Speaks for Wolf’’ continues with Grandfather telling the story of the relationship between the tribe and Wolf. He tells the boy how the human community decided to seek a newhome in the forest without considering their impact on Wolf, how the relationship deteriorated,and how they eventually learned to consider all perspectives before they tried a new course ofaction. ‘‘Who Speaks for Wolf’’ ends with a description of the way a decision-making council would
close:
Until at last someone would rise
and ask the old, old question
to remind us of things
we do not yet see clearly enough to remember.
Tell me now my brothers. Tell me now my sisters:
Who speaks . . . for Wolf?

The story ends with a question. By not telling us what we need to do or what we are supposed to learn, it leaves an open loop through which insight and reection might slip each time
we hear it. We might notice the cadences of its language, a rhythm created by phrase repetitions
that rocks us into a receptive state.
Simmons’s story about Larry has many of these anatomical characteristics, which help make ita real, live, cuddly kitten. As we create our own tradition of learning stories and other metaphoric
tools for inquiry, we have the gifts of other cultures, as well as the wholeness of our human experience from which to draw.

48

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONS

Jennie Butchart’s
Sunken Garden
Scott Thompson

We stand for a time in her vision,
surrounded by green dark cliffs of cascading ivy
and the lighter green spray of ferns
and wavering threads of falling water.
We wander along dreambeds
where Gooseneck Loosestrife
suspends her spilling snow akes
and Bearded Tongue displays pink and white coronets,
while the lemon-yellow horns of Angel’s Trumpets bow
and Angel’s Fishing Rod dangles magenta lures.
Here we see the scarlet-dotted orange orbsof Scotsman’s Purse and the clustered
lavender bells of Grape Hyacinth.
And we cannot completely believethat this silent eruptionof cultivated magic
began in the gray-clay waste
of a limestone-emptied quarry.

Reection

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Scott Thompson

49

Q

If you have ever doubted the transforming power of vision,
pay a visit to the Butchart Gardens of Vancouver Island anddoubt no more. In 1908, when cement industrialist Robert
Pim Butchart had emptied a large quarry of its limestone
and clay, his wife Jennie went to work in the place, a vastand desolate cubic hole in their property. More than a decade later, the waste place had been transformed into theSunken Garden, a stunning and enchanted spot that draws
and inspires thousand of visitors daily. The acres surrounding the Sunken Garden were also cultivated into exquisite
gardens, including a Japanese Garden, a Rose Garden, andan Italian Garden. The entire place oozes with magic, but I
was most in awe of the Sunken Garden simply because it
began as an emptied quarry and had been utterly, powerfully transformed. Jennie Butchart died in 1950, but throughthe instantiation of her vision, she is daily and deeply reaching the souls of thousands.

THOMPSON
Jennie Butchart’s Sunken GardenxThis story, of course, is not solely about vision. It is also about passion, perseverance,
and the interplay of vision and personal mastery. Jennie Butchart had not been much ofa gardener before 1908, but in pursuit of her vision, she became a master gardener andthe creator of a patch of earth like no other.

Acknowledgment

Scott Thompson
Assistant Director
Panasonic Foundation
sthompson@foundation.
panasonic.com

I have exercised poetic license in writing my poem. Although all the plants I mention arefound at Butchart Gardens, not all are within the Sunken Garden. I felt that this particular
combination of names and the images they evoke helped me better to convey the wonderof the experience. Do I feel any guilt? Nah! Poets great and small have been doing it for
centuries.

50

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
qVolume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSThe Four Elements ofEvery Successful Story
Robert DickmanAt the center of every culture is a group of people seated around a  re telling tales of
the heroes whose struggles transformed and remade their world. That’s true whetherthe re is the burning embers of a cooking re in the Amazon basin or the  ickering pixels
of a cathode ray tube in upper Manhattan. It’s true whether the hero is White Buffalo Calf
Woman, whose gift of the sacred pipe gave birth to the Sioux nation, or Neal Armstrong,whose view of the world from the moon ushered in an era of globalization. These stories
do more than de ne a culture; they shape and move it, making it a living thing. As author
Daniel Quinn has said, ‘‘The carrier of culture is the story we tell ourselves over andover’’(1995).
As human beings, we communicate primarily through the telling of stories. We arebombarded by hundreds of stories each day—stories about which toothpaste is best,
about terrorists lurking in the shadows, about new scienti c miracles and eternal spiritual
truths. We hear so many stories that it is hard to study story as story itself. We are like sh trying to see water. What we need is a good de nition of what a story is.
The de nition I nd best is: A story is a fact wrapped in an emotion that can compel
us to take action and so transform the world around us.
This de nition holds true as far back in the study of story as we can go. Jerome
Bruner, the father of cognitive psychology, believes that storytelling is hardwired into our
psyches. Bruner has observed that, from an early age, children tell stories. First are thestories of completion. The young child says (by means of gesture and facial expression),‘‘All gone,’’ when the bottle is empty. The child says, ‘‘Uh oh,’’ when she feels she has
made a mistake and, ‘‘Ohh!’’ when surprised or pleased.
These stories are short but complete. And they meet our de nition. Take ‘‘all gone.’’
The fact is that the bottle is nished. This fact is wrapped in an emotion, either satisfaction
or desire for more. Depending on which emotion it is, an adult is compelled to take anaction—either to burp the baby and settle her down, or to get another bottle. Either way,
the baby’s world is transformed for the better. Bruner asserts that infants develop meaning
through narrative, and that the need to create stories precedes language. He suggests that
infants are motivated to learn to speak precisely because they already have stories insidethem that they want to share with others (Bruner, 1990).
Not all stories end happily. Living in Germany in the aftermath of World War I was
frightening and brutal. Hitler wrapped that fact in the powerful emotions of paranoia andanti-Semitism. How powerfully he conveyed those emotions can be seen in the surviving
 lms of his speeches. The story he told— that the Jews were responsible —compelled theGerman people to take actions that transformed the world into a living hell. Thoughstorytelling is innate in human beings, it is a value-free process. Story as story is neutral.
As corporate executives, scientists, and academics committed to moving our culture toward the common good, we must understand how to use the incredible power of story
to communicate sometimes unpleasant but important facts, such as global warming or
income disparities, in human terms, so that our culture takes actions to change our world
for the better.
What makes a good story? What makes a story great? Why do some stories have alife of only a few news cycles, while others come to dominate our cultural debate? What

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Robert Dickman
Founder, FirstVoice
bob@rst-voice.com

51

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
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DICKMANx
The Four Elements of Every Successful Story

gives a story staying power at the box of ce or in the boss’s ofce? Having spent myprofessional life intimately involved with stories as an actor, communications coach, andcorporate consultant in intracorporate communication and branding, I have come to observe that all successful stories have four basic components.
To make them easy to remember I call these components PHAT: passion, hero, antagonist, and transformation. These components lie within any story, whether a movie,
a business presentation, or a political debate. When these components are understoodand used effectively, stories speak to our basic human condition and needs. Because thesenarrative needs are hardwired into us almost from birth, stories written 5,000 years ago
in languages long dead can still speak to us.
Before we go further, we should return to the very basics.
Pythagoras was probably the  rst great systems thinker in our Western culture. But
because none of his writing is available in its original form, our study of story components
begins with his student, the philosopher and poet Empedocles. From Empedocles, we rst
get the concept of the world made up of four elements: re, earth, air, and water. Until
recently, conventional wisdom viewed Empedocles as a natural philosopher —in essencea proto-scientist—primarily trying to describe the material world. More recent scholarship(by Hadot, 2002; Kingsley, 1995; and others) has shown that the four elements of Empedocles were not solely material but also described inner psychological states. Empedocles attributed divinity to these elements because he saw them as partaking of the eternal
nature of consciousness itself and called them ‘‘the four roots’’ because he saw them as
the basis of life.
In that archetypal psychological sense, Empedocles’s elements relate to our understanding of story. Those interested in pursuing this view of the pre-Socratics are referredto the more recent works of philosopher Oscar Ichazo (available online at arica.org).
How do the archetypal elements of Empedocles relate to the narrative elements of
PHAT? Since story is the carrier of culture, and Empedocles’s elements lie at the core ofours, it is not surprising that there is a direct correlation. Using the elements as an anchor
allows us to deal with story structure in a less linear fashion.
Once again, the key I use is PHAT: passion, hero, antagonist, and transformation.

Passion52

Every powerful narrative has passion, the emotion that is wrapped around our story’s
central fact. This corresponds to Empedocles’s re—passion that ignites the story in theheart of the audience. When an audience rst comes to a story, it is far from being auni ed body. It is composed of separate individuals with differing needs, desires, anddistractions.
Theater people often call a new or difcult audience ‘‘cold.’’ They understand thatthe audience must be ‘‘warmed up’’ before it can absorb new material.
Passion is the re that attracts the audience’s attention and draws it into the story. It
makes us want to hear more. Passion is the sword that cuts away the excess baggage ofpast thought and images and calls our attention to the present. It unies us as an audience. And in that unity, which
both transcends our self and reinforces it, there is tremendous strength. We turn on the TV every night even when
there is nothing really good on, just to be part of the story.
Every signi cant social and political movement musthave passion to exist. In my workshops, I often ask people
to describe the most powerful public event they ever attended. A few years ago, a friend
described being at the August 1963 peaceful civil rights march on Washington and hearing
Martin Luther King’s famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. If you have a moment, you mightwant to read that speech again. It is storytelling at its absolute nest. My friend recalledthat as she stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in a crowd of more than one million
people, the passionate heartfelt words and images of King’s story washed over her, andall the people around her seemed to disappear. ‘‘It was as if he were talking directly tome,’’ she said.
That is what passion does. It makes the story personal. It makes us care.

Passion is the re that attracts theaudience’s attention and draws it
into the story.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSDICKMANx
The Four Elements of Every Successful Story
Q

Rachel Lillian Kohn

Hero
All the passion in the world won’t do any good unless you have someplace to put it. That
is where the hero comes in. The hero relates to Empedocles’s element of earth. It is theway the story is grounded in our reality. By hero, I don’t mean Superman or a grandmotherwho rushes into a burning building to save a baby, though these are examples of heroes,
but the character in the story who gives the audience a point of view.
This point of view needs to be substantial enough that the story has ‘‘a leg to standon,’’ but of a scale that allows us to identify with it. The hero is both our surrogate andour guide through the narrative. The hero’s vision of the world creates the landscape theaudience enters.
For the audience to identify with the hero’s point of view, they must feel a little pieceof themselves in the hero’s situation, so part of the hero’s function is to create a sense ofequality with the audience. If the hero is too perfect, the audience rapidly loses interest.
Good stories have heroes who are human and authentic.
Whatever you think of Ronald Reagan’s politics, he was a great storyteller. He knew
the importance of heroes in creating a political consensus. He understood that with theright hero, people would see even dry and technical facts
from a personal viewpoint. During his State of the Union
addresses, when he got to a point that might be abstract oran issue that might be divisive, he would point up to theCongressional Gallery and there, posed and waiting, was an‘‘American Hero’’ who personi ed the point Reagan was trying to make. Reagan controlled the national debate by using heroes to de ne the territory it would cover.
One of the most important characteristics of the hero is that without him or her there
can be no action. In David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, there is a wonderful scene in which
Prince Feisal (played by Alec Guinness) asks an American reporter why he has come all
the way to the Arabian Desert. The reporter replies that he believes it is time for America
to become involved in the war against Germany, and it is his job to make a hero out of
Lawrence. The reporter knew America would take action only if the issue had a humanface.

If the hero is too perfect, theaudience rapidly loses interest.

Antagonist
For a story, problems are like air. They breathe life into the narrative. If no obstacles
appear, the audience views the story as at. It’s seen merely as propaganda or a public

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DICKMANThe Four Elements of Every Successful Storyx

relations puff piece. Dealing with the antagonist creates an atmosphere, which makes thestory interesting and credible. In fact, the antagonist is the  rst thing we think of when
we think of a story.
The Dalai Lama says, ‘‘Each one of us has an innate desire to seek happiness andovercome suffering’’ (1998: 34). Great stories mirror this reality. Seeking happiness is the
motivation. Overcoming suffering is doing battle with the antagonist. Instinctively, humans are interested in how others deal with their problems. Funneling this curiosity into
the narrative deepens the audience’s attention and drives the story forward.
A great problem, often personi ed as an identiable villain, crystallizes the facts ofthe story and helps them come alive. A powerful antagonist is central to most great stories
and gives the action of the hero (and by extension, the audience) direction and focus. It
is very hard to  nd that focus without a good villain. Two-time Academy Award winnerWilliam Goldman says that every screenplay has to answer just three questions: ‘‘Who is
your hero? What does he want? Who the hell is keeping him from getting it?’’(1986).
The creative potential of the antagonist to inspire action
can be seen in the still-unfolding Enron scandal. At  rst, theEnron story is just a set of facts. It’s the largest bankruptcy
in corporate history, but not all that different from otherenormous nancial disasters, and as such restricted to thebusiness sections of your local paper. The press gives us a
point of view by discovering the story’s heroes, all the hardworking Enron employees who, through no fault of their own, are having their life savings
wiped out. But we still don’t know what to do about it.
What action should we take? That becomes clear only when the villain comes onstage in the form of Kenneth Lay, the man who not only destroyed the heroes’ wealth,but made a pretty penny doing it. Suddenly, we can take action. A bill to promote corporate responsibility passes Congress and things change. How much they will change isanother story. The point is that, without an antagonist, our actions might have remained
unfocused and unproductive.
Of course, there is a moral danger in creating an antagonist. We don’t want to demonize our opponents. So it is important to remember that the purpose of the antagonist
is not to create conict, but to help clarify it.
Lockheed’s ‘‘Skunk Works’’ is one of the world’s premier aircraft design rms. It hasdeveloped many of the  nest US military aircraft over the past 60 years. Its slogan is,

The purpose of the antagonist is
not to create conict, but to help
clarify it.

Q

Rachel Lillian Kohn

54

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSTransformation
Transformation is the natural result of a well-told story. Our heroes take action to overcome their problems, and they and the world around them are changed. The element that
relates to transformation is, of course, water. Water is the most transformable of all theelements. Place it in a container, and it conforms to that new shape. Though it is soft tothe touch, it can also cut through limestone and granite, carving rivers and valleys into
the landscape. It is in the waters of the ocean that the greatest transformation of all rst
occurred, the miracle of life.
The audience feels satis ed when they see the hero emerge from the res of hell achanged and better human being. Learning from the negative and moving on toward thegood gives us all hope. Achilles begins The Iliad in a snit, refusing his duties to his comrades in arms, but ends the story defeating his enemy Hector and honoring his fallen foe
in death. Hamlet dithers in a world of moral ambiguity, but
in the end takes actions that remove a great evil from theheart of his kingdom. Luke Skywalker accepts the reality of
The Force and gives the republic new hope.
These stories don’t have to have a happy ending. The
last scene of Hamlet is hardly a laugh riot. But they do allfollow a common arc. We want our heroes to break fromthe bondage of their past and generate a more vital future. When the hero moves fromsel sh to sel ess, this mirrors the hidden potential in each of us. We embrace those stories
and make them our own.
After emerging from a long prison con nement, Nelson Mandela expressed no bitterness or hatred toward his captors. Instead, he exuded wisdom and compassion, andthat began to move South Africa away from its bloody past. The very forces that had tried
for so long to destroy him had transformed Mandela. The whole world could understandhis story. How could they not? Joseph Campbell has said, ‘‘When we stop thinking primarily of ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness’’ (1948).

DICKMANx
The Four Elements of Every Successful Story‘‘It takes a great enemy to make a great airplane.’’ What Skunk Works understands isthat in a good corporate story (and it is the corporate story that de nes the corporate
culture), con ict or struggle with an enemy is far from destructive. It can create a positive
atmosphere for innovation by making it important to maximize effort. It helps unify theteam to move forward toward a common goal. What makes the story positive or negativeis the nature of that goal.

We want our heroes to break fromthe bondage of their past andgenerate a more vital future.

Using the Four Elements
Once the four elemental components of the PHAT model are understood, their use in theanalysis of story is relatively straightforward. If you want to know whether a story you
plan to use in a political or media campaign will be successful, you should ask fourquestions:
1. Passion. Does the story contain suf cient passion to engage the emotions of its target
audience? Are the stakes high enough? The emotions of a story act as its primaryanchor in memory and its motivation to action (which could be at the point of purchase or in the ballot box).
2. Hero. Does the story provide a clearly de ned point of view? Can the facts that lie at
its core be understood? Can this point of view be comfortably accepted by the target
audience?
3. Antagonist. Are the obstacles that confront the hero of the story (and by extension,
the audience) expressed clearly so that the actions needed to overcome those obstacles are understood and the challenge of taking such actions fully accepted?
4. Transformation. Does the story have the power to change the life of the audience ina meaningful way, and is that transformation positive?

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

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DICKMANx
The Four Elements of Every Successful Story

If the answer to these four questions is yes, then the story is likely to be successful. If not,then it won’t be.
If your story is weaker in one area than in another, then work on the weak element.
For example, you feel very powerful emotions about the scientic facts underlying global
warming, and you know who the bad guys are (we all do know, don’t we), but you’re
not able to provide the audience with a point of view that allows them to feel comfortable
accepting those facts. As a result, they nd your story, well, science ction. What yourstory needs is a good hero. A hero your audience can relate to and accept as authentic
and whose problems mirror their own. It shouldn’t be hard to nd one. There are plentyof heroes out there, and once your story has a good one, it will be grounded in theexperience of your audience and easily accepted and understood.
Or let’s say you are giving a presentation to an interdepartmental meeting within yourcorporation. You’ve carefully marshaled your facts so each department can see what relates to its particular interests. You’ve laid out the steps needed to overcome the obstacles
ahead. There is no doubt the overall result will be a positive transformation.
But you nish speaking and notice a distinct lack of interest in your audience. You
think you may have even seen your boss sti e a yawn. Your problem may be that you
haven’t connected your passion to your presentation.
Remember, according to our de nition of story, it is emotion that makes facts compel
people to take action. You need to ask yourself why you care about the project you aresuggesting. What feelings does it bring up? If you nd your own emotional anchor to theproject—why you want to suggest it—and can be open and honest about those feelings
without histrionics, that passion will transmit to your audience. At the very least, it will
provoke a heated discussion of the topic. With passion, your presentation will re youraudience up, and that beats cold stares anytime.
Of course, storytelling is an art, and no one element of the PHAT paradigm can everbe considered in total isolation. For example, you might have problems connecting to thepassion of a story because you really don’t feel comfortable with the transformation it
produces. Analyzing problems in corporate communication requires subtlety and experience, but the PHAT model and its grounding in the four elements of Empedocles is an
excellent place to begin.
Because human beings have an innate ability to take in information and organize itin narrative form, and because shared stories are at the core of every culture, the key tochanging a corporate culture lies in eliciting, understanding, and clarifying the stories on
which it is based.

References
56

Bruner, J. ‘‘Entry into Meaning.’’ Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990):
67–98.
Campbell, J. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948).
Dalai Lama. The Four Noble Truths (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998).
Goldman, W. Adventures in the Screen Trade (New York: Warner Books, 1986).
Hadot, P. What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard University Press,
2002).
Kingsley, P. Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Quinn, D. Ishmael (New York: Bantam Books, 1995).

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSDICKMAN

Commentary

Beth Jandernoa
Founding partner
The Ashland Institutebjandernoa@aol.com

The Four Elements of Every Successful Story

As I read Robert Dickman’s article, I remembered an experience I had when the power of storytelling brought a group of disparate individuals together. I and some fellow SoL consultants were
helping to launch a cross-level, cross-organizational team on a yearlong project to reinvent strategy for a global Fortune 500 company. We had gathered a group of 25 of the ‘‘best’’ young thinkers in the company from every continent. The group faced a formidable task, and we knew thathaving them gel into a team early on was critical to the project’s success.
After a few days of orientation, we were struck by the strong sense of individuality and the
disjointed feel of the group. After all, these were the stars of the company, and they had learned
to succeed by being seen as having the best ideas. We needed to nd a way to turn the energy ofindividuality into a collective force. So, on the third evening, we decided to gather the group into a
circle and invite each person to tell a story of the signicant experiences that had shaped theirlives and brought them to where they were. We decided to risk boredom and the possibility that it
could make things even worse.
As people told their stories, we noticed that they began to come alive and become real toeach of us. The turning point came when the secretary who had been assigned to assist the group
described her poor and tragic childhood and her triumph over great adversity. She had lost her
parents at an early age and was not able to go through school in the traditional sense. She had
started as a mail sorter and educated herself at night. She was now the secretary to the chief
operations ofcer of the company. Her story lifted the group’s spirit and unleashed a feeling that
we could overcome any obstacles we faced together. As the stories continued, we began to feel thepartnership of beginning on a long, arduous journey together. By the end of that night, there wasa shared commitment to something larger than all of us and a gratitude for the commonality ofspirit among us.
The elements about which Dickman writes—passion, hero, antagonist, and transformation—in
this secretary’s story transformed the group from being competitive individuals to a cohesive team.

x

by Beth Jandernoa

Commentaryby Michael Sales
Leaders shape culture and tell the organization what its story is. Leaders are heroes whose metaphors and narratives turn everyday routines into inspiring struggles. In my work as a consultant
and coach, I’ve seen many people overlook what could have been dening moments, both for them
individually and for their organizations, by not taking advantage of an opportunity to tell a greatstory:

57

x The dean of a leading college has an enormous amount of data about why the school is sucha spectacular institution, but bores his listeners to tears with an endless chronology of facts.

x A judge sentences a defendant according to the letter of the law, rather than connecting thexdecision to norms of principled behavior in a way that reinforces society’s moral code.
A female manager with a deep understanding of an organization’s core dynamics chronicallydefers speechifying to men who don’t have her insight because she is nervous in front of a
crowd of high-powered men.

All these people need to learn how to ‘‘wrap fact in emotion’’ to mobilize the others. Compare theirlimitations with John Kennedy’s inaugural address or almost anything Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill ever said in public. I once heard Richard Burton reading names, addresses, and numbers from the phone book. He delivered these lines with innitely more pathos than the multitudeof professors and executives, whose endless droning demonstrates the shallowness of their connection to their audiences.
As a student of power and leadership, I appreciate Dickman’s value-neutral stance toward‘‘story as story’’; that is, we don’t have to agree with the storyteller’s views to recognize when they

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

Michael Sales
Principal
New Context Consulting
mjsales@attbi.com

DICKMANThe Four Elements of Every Successful Storyx

are mobilizing others to act. As I write, for example, George W. Bush is doing a pretty good job ofdemonizing Saddam Hussein: ‘‘You know, he tried to kill my dad.’’ I think that painting good andevil versions of the world is the antithesis of systems thinking, but —at least for the moment —thepresident, like Reagan before him, is weaving a powerful, simple story using this approach. We
don’t have to like the story for it to work. As Berger and Luckmann argue forcefully, ‘‘Create theframe and own the game’’ (1972). In fact, Dickman’s cautionary tale about Hitler’s persuasivenessas a storyteller reminds me of the American Civil Liberties Union’s dictum: ‘‘The answer to speechthat offends us is better speech.’’While we become extraordinarily acclimated to the ‘‘given’’ story that constitutes reality, isn’t
it true that the ‘‘denition of the situation’’ (as Argyris and Schön might say [1978]) is really up for
grabs? At any moment, an Arthurian gure might step forward and completely redene the accepted state of being.
Revealing my age (and more), I can vividly remember Mario Savio jumping on top of a car at
the height of a demonstration for freedom of speech at Berkeley in 1964, grabbing a megaphone,and exclaiming, ‘‘We are human beings! Do not bend, fold, or mutilate!’’ Much of what has become
the history of modern student rights began at that moment. Before Savio told his simple, eloquent
story, students were more seen than heard. A ‘‘hero,’’ in Dickman’s terminology, seized the instantand red an idea that was heard around the world.
At every moment of human history, there have been passionate men and women who told
stories of struggle and transformation. Perhaps Dickman’s deceptively simple rules of narration willcause more good ideas and energy to break through in all sorts of social systems.

References
Argyris, C. and D. Schön. Organizational Learning (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
Berger, P.L. and T.L. Luckmann. The Social Construction of Reality (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1972).

Commentary
by Marshall Goldsmith

58
Marshall Goldsmith
Founding Director, A4SL
The Alliance for Strategic Leadership
Coeditor, Coaching for Leadership
Marshall@a4sl.com

Robert Dickman’s concept of story is useful for understanding what makes organizational communication meaningful and important. Too many leaders (especially those with technical backgrounds)
get lost in the content of what they are saying. They think that if the appropriate facts are communicated, their job is done. Without the four key components of the story, facts can seem dry
and lifeless. E-mails seldom spur anyone on to bigger and better things. The leader’s role is not justto communicate, but to inspire. Great stories can help create the inspiration and commitment required for successfully executing strategy.
I spend a great deal of my time coaching executives. The four story elements are useful forunderstanding why some leaders achieve long-term change in behavior, while others do not. Whenleaders demonstrate a passion for personal change, realize that they are both the hero and theantagonist in their struggle for transformation, and involve their coworkers in their ongoing story,
they always improve. When they leave out any of the key elements, they seldom achieve positive,
long-term change.
I would suggest one more layer for building on this concept. Everyone in the organizationneeds to write his or her own story of personal change and growth. We all need to understand
how we t in the larger story of the organization and how we can demonstrate passion and be thehero of our own drama. We need to understand our own antagonists (both internal and external).
In order to succeed in a changing world, we all must continually strive for our own transformation.
By involving all employees in creating the organizational story, we can make happy endings afunction of us, not them.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSLearning to Anneal:
An Interview with Vic Leo
George L. RothAs manager for executive development, Vic Leo was central to the efforts that broughtsystems thinking and organizational learning concepts to Ford Motor Company. After33 years of service to Ford, Leo retired at the beginning of 2000. He recently re ected on
corporate learning and systems initiatives at Ford—how they started, what they achieved,
where they were effective, and what they may have lacked.
The insights from Leo’s efforts to create more effective organizational practices gowell beyond speci c conditions at Ford. They were set in the broader context of American
management practices and embedded in an MIT research-center-sponsored consortiumof leading companies. These companies all applied organizational learning techniques,
shared their results, and sought to learn from each other’s efforts. The efforts at Ford, likeother large corporations, were not abstract, isolated initiatives, but programs undertaken
to improve performance and to better align with changing technological opportunities,
consumer preferences, and new competition.
Since his retirement from Ford, Leo has focused on developing his skills in a newactivity—glassblowing. As an avid collector of museum-quality glass for many years, Leo
is now learning to produce this art form. Here he re ects on his new avocation and its
lessons for organizational learning and change efforts. One stage of glassblowing, annealing, strengthens and hardens the glass, whereas learning implies exibility and  uidity in doing something new and different. In this context, anneal is something that we
do to strengthen our positions after learning and changes have taken place. In the practiceof glassblowing, a creation is unstable if it is not annealed. Might organizations and theirpeople also be more effective if learning and change programs included annealing?

Vic Leo
Former Program Manager
Executive Development Center
Ford Motor Company
Resident Artist, Baron Glassworks
vleo@htdconnect.com

59

Roots of Systems Thinking at Ford
In 1985, Ford started a series of executive development meetings in which its top managers
from different ofces and functions gathered for a weeklong program in mixed groups of
50. The program created a ‘‘global village,’’ bringing together the company’s leadershipto discuss the agenda of then-Chairman Don Peterson and Ford’s policy and strategy
committee.
Leo joined the executive development center at the end of the initial program to createa successive program. Instead of repeating the program with the strategic issues handed
down from the policy and strategy committee, Leo interviewed 200 executives to understand what they wanted to learn. Interviewing had its detractors; after all, it was countercultural in a business that was then top-down and design driven. Three themes emerged
from the interviews: globalization and operating in world markets, leadership to bringabout globalization, and thinking differently. Leo commented:
The third theme was a fuzzy one, but it was articulated consistently. Executives would grapple with a problem, make progress, and then run into a wall. With the world moving so fast,they’d ask, ‘‘Isn’t there a way to break through these problems, a different way of thinking
about them?’’

REFLECTIONS, Volume 4, Number 3

George L. RothResearch Associate
MIT Sloan School of Management
groth@mit.edu

2003 by the Society for Organizational Learning and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
q

ROTH
x
Learning to Anneal

Leo and others at Ford looked at various writings and research that addressed thinking. They chose Russell Ackoff and his research on the new industrial revolution andPeter Senge and his work on systems dynamics. Both Ackoff
and Senge were systems theorists, developing approaches
to conceptualize business issues in terms of operating andthinking systemically. Both were asked to be instructors forthe next executive development program. The focus of the
program, which all Ford executives attended between 1987
and 1990, was globalization, leadership, and thinking systemically. Leo remarked:

Might organizations and theirpeople also be more effective if
learning and change programs
included annealing?

The systems thinking module, done by either Ackoff or Senge, received very high marks,
probably 9.5 on a scale of 1 to 10. The concepts were honest, straightforward, and engaging.
But executives said in their evaluations, ‘‘I don’t see what I would do differently on Monday
morning.’’ It was the same, class after class, session after session, to the point where I could
write their evaluations. Several times, they challenged me directly: ‘‘Vic, if you could show
us what application looks like, it would really be something.’’ That issue served as a mandate
for my remaining years at Ford.

Learning from Projects

60

A natural way to address the issue was to undertake projects that applied systems thinking
concepts. The idea of a project was easy to conceptualize, but much harder to bring into
practice. Over time, four projects emerged —a vehicle development team,1 a manufacturing plant (Woodhaven Stamping Plant), a components plant (Electronic Fuel Handling
Division), and a staff group (Occupational Health and Safety).
The projects helped teams use the ideas of thinking systemically to be more effective.
The researchers’ care, attention, and good work fostered signi cant learning and demonstrated the effectiveness of systems ideas. The results of the projects were outstanding.
The product development team produced a ne vehicle, reduced the rework, and returned
almost $100 million that had been in their initial budget. The oscillations in the stamping
plant’s productivity, quality, and unit costs were reduced dramatically, and it won a Ford
Quality 1 award. The components plant went from losing money to making a spectacularprot. The results of the staff group were less clear because its success depended on its
customers’ perceptions. It had been organized as a group of specialists— health, chemistry, safety, and so on. A redesign of the function created interdependent teams so thata team could look at a plant’s whole occupational health and safety agenda. Plant managers were elated with the new approach. All the projects took several years, and theresults lasted well into the future.
Each project started with problem de nition and consideration of options for improving performance. The goal of the different projects was to apply systems thinking
ideas to improve performance and learn from that effort. That the concepts implied personal and organizational change was only implicitly considered. Leo commented:
Some might say that undertaking specic projects is a limited vision, but in the work of both
Senge and Ackoff, there is the notion that systemic thinking is quite a revolutionary way oflooking at the world. We did not utter the word ‘‘change,’’ partly because change at Fordmight not be consistent with systems thinking. Traditional change involved incremental, segmented ways of thinking. We were advocating that reality was more complicated than thesimple cause-and-effect relationships that managers look for in change efforts. So instead of
calling these ‘‘change projects,’’ we labeled the effort a ‘‘systems approach to management.’’

To aid the learning effort, the application of the concepts included explicit assessmentof the results. The four pilot projects had been successful in terms of introducing newconcepts, producing business results, and developing a better understanding of the benets of organizational learning approaches.
We brought a body of understanding and principles into work groups and had a signi cant
impact in human terms —in people’s relations to one another, in stress reduction, and in improved interactions. We produced signi cant business results, not just spending $50,000 or

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From the initial assessment and from 17 subsequent projects (1991 to 1999), I grew extraordinarily self-condent and maybe even arrogant. I felt invulnerable in my ability to engage in projects and have a large human and bottom-line impact. I was not alone in these
efforts; I always had a cadre of capable people in organizational learning efforts and constructive relationships with line managers and senior managers.
I honestly believed that we could do these projects, synthesize, and learn what we needed.
The notions of scale or change were not on the agenda, or that big word ‘‘transformation.’’Learning more about these ideas was to follow from results, not lead them.

Testing and implementing organizational learning ideas at Ford were successful inmany ways. The four ofcial pilot projects led to many more ofcial and unofcial efforts,
too widespread and numerous to describe in this interview. The people who participatedin the programs learned new skills, applied them in their work, and achieved personaland business results. After several years, when Leo and his team stepped back to look at
the learning initiatives, two concepts—scale and change—emerged as signi cant issues
that they had not fully conceptualized and addressed in Ford’s learning efforts.

Scale
The original goal of the organizational learning efforts came from ideas of thinking about
thinking and, in particular, thinking of Ford as a large system and improving it. An understanding of scale and its implications in engaging an organization as a system is whatmakes this concept different from the traditional approaches to change. Leo remarked:
Around 1996, we became interested in the issue of scale. How could we have a substantial
impact on Ford? We were able to articulate the question but weren’t able to come up withany great ideas. I can sit here today and honestly say I don’t have any wisdom about scale,even after almost two dozen projects. There was a tremendous opportunity around 1998 to
conduct big projects that would qualify as ‘‘scale.’’I suggested working with four or  ve assembly plants simultaneously. The VP of manufacturing was disappointed, saying, ‘‘Why not all 22 plants?’’ I responded, ‘‘Because I don’tknow how to do 22 all at once.’’ I then realized I was working at Ford, a huge system. It
would have been nice to go all the way, but I felt that I did not have a cadre or support
structure in place to allow the momentum to take over.
Achieving scale doesn’t work with loosely linked projects, such as the fractal design of theSociety for Organizational Learning. A plant or team needs an incredible amount of energy
and commitment for an organizational learning project. Not
one of our projects took less than a year to complete; somewere as long as three years. The facilitator or consultant
worked at an intense, deep level. To replicate that quality ofthinking and attention to a project in a collaborative way
across 22 plants was beyond my imagination.
We had meager resources to bring to bear. At one time, we
had 35 people with organizational learning capability spreadthroughout the company. But in an organization as large as
Ford, they were few and far between. They were so buried inlocal activities that freeing them to do something of the organizational scale the VP had suggested would have been extremely difcult.
To this day, I feel cheated. We earned the right to explore having a systems orientation in avery large organization. We shaped business practices, their processes, and their outcomes.
We had the data and the people to make major contributions. We did large projects— awhole factory, a product development team, and a division. But we didn’t have projects
crossing the three major disciplines—product development, manufacturing, sales and marketing.
I raised the issue of scale at Society for Organizational Learning meetings and conference
sessions. It was a plea for help. I kept saying that we needed to understand scale. My clock
was running out. I’d been promoting organizational learning for seven or eight years. Some

We didn’t have projects crossing
the three major disciplines —product development,
manufacturing, sales andmarketing.

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xof the projects were huge in terms of the number of people involved. Some were as big as asmall company, for example, a factory with 2,100 people. But I knew it was time to grow.

Discussions on the concept of scale had created insights into the various types ofleadership needed for a large organization to engage in learning as a system. Leo was oneof the people in the consortium of companies working with MIT researchers who helped
create the concept of ‘‘network leadership.’’2 Other types of leadership—executive andline leadership—were also essential for making progress on the issue of scale. As Leocommented:
You have to have all three. The network leader cannot assume the role of the executive. You
can sit down with the vice presidents of manufacturing, process reengineering, and the divisions and establish a rapport that you think will help take the organization to the next level.
It’s a bit of a pipe dream or naiveté. I went into these discussions based on the belief that it
was important work, so let’s move forward. But I was in the position of a network leader; I
never came close to ful lling the executive role. I should have collaborated more with achampion to engage the whole executive group.
I remember being sad when I heard other stories in which the companies did have executive leadership, such as the chairman at Shell Oil or the CEO at Harley-Davidson. I would
often think, ‘‘Wow, what would it be like to have leadership at that level in our projects?’’
Ford’s executive leaders were on the weak side. In the end, they didn’t help take us to a newlevel.

The learning efforts and attempts at scaling organizational learning projects were nottotally without the involvement of Ford’s top management. A group of top managers, allvice presidents, were involved, active, and ready to meet regularly. Leo related:

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We established a group called ‘‘Leaders for Learning,’’ vice presidents from all functional activities. All had an organizational learning project going on somewhere. I thought they could
share those experiences and explore the big questions: Should we grow it? Should we map
something cross-functionally? With the help of the vice president for human resources, I
started the group thinking about the issue of scale for the company.
Initially, I thought the group would organize itself. The VPs all had signi cant responsibilities, were intellectual, and were at the top. But, as it turned out, they wanted me to set an
agenda for every meeting. And I was paralyzed in a way. I called in some people I knew tointeract with the group. Peter Senge, Russ Ackoff, and Bill O’Brien came, all in an attempt togive us a better, holistic picture of systems thinking and organizational learning. But it didn’tsell. There was no self-organizing. The group wanted to know, ‘‘What’s on the next meeting
agenda?’’The VPs thought that perhaps they could get the president of Ford to join. This was a de ning moment. If the president would join, the group could really be meaningful. I knew
right then that the group effort was over.
I went to the president on another matter and took the opportunity to mention the Leaders
for Learning group and, really delicately, said that it would be great if he could become amember. He asked, ‘‘Who are all the members?’’ He looked at the list I had with me andsaid, ‘‘Hey, these guys are all the movers and shakers. They’re the ones who will get thisstuff done. You have the right group. I’m not needed.’’ I just couldn’t tell him they thought
he was the key ingredient. He said, in a declaratory way, ‘‘They are the group.’’
When I told the VPs that the president felt they were the right group, it wasn’t long before
the next meeting was called and fewer people attended. Fewer and fewer attended subsequent meetings. Then they questioned whether we should be getting together at all. The
group just withered away. I couldn’t nd a galvanizing way to keep them together.

The involvement of different types and levels of leadership were insufcient for addressing
issues of scale and systems changes. Leo commented:
We helped to formulate a theory about the need for executive, line, and network leadershipfor effective, sustainable change. This approach was very successful on projects that were in
the boundary of a specic executive. For example, in manufacturing plants, the plant manager is the line leader, the area manager over that plant is the executive leader, and the network leader is usually an internal facilitator who works in the plant.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSWe helped to formulate a theory
about the need for executive, line,
and network leadership for
effective, sustainable change.

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Executives can be sponsors and be supportive, but that role is very different when they are
expected to in uence the larger system. For example, in a product development team project,
the executive director was supportive. When called on to in uence the larger system, his role
wasn’t so clear-cut. We sought out the next level and involved more senior people, but their agendas were often
more complicated. Jumping from the idea of having an executive, line manager, and networker at the project level didn’t
work so well at the higher systems level. There were missing
ingredients that need to be discovered before making the upward leap.
We didn’t challenge our thinking enough. What other dynamics should we have been aware of or sensitive to? We
just did more of the same. As I re ect, I know it’s not that simple. The success rate for crossboundary projects was nowhere near the same as it was in the well-bounded situations inwhich the three roles worked interactively.

Systemic Change
The issues of scale and inuencing a large corporation like Ford with small, pilot projects
raise questions about organizational change. The learning efforts sought to create systemicchange. The desired change was to be based on an understanding of Ford and its suppliersand customers in order to align operations and improve overall performance.
How does an organization think of itself as a system, and from that perspective,
measure and assess itself?
We tried several things in our quest to be systemic, and we were always interested in assessment. In the broadest sense of the concept, I looked for both a human contribution and aphysical or process contribution. I had a notion of releasing people’s abilities and not imposing constraints on that process. Releasing talent and letting it develop are outcomes of being
systemic.
Second, there should be benets to the company, consumers, and society at large from systemic improvements. Is the product better? Is the service better? What are the traditional
measurements for these improvements? We had good evidence on what constitutes a good
product and what constitutes good customer service. Our projects were structured at the outset to produce evidence.
Many executives were excited about the evidence, which had to do with the total vehicle(car or truck) as a whole system. They remembered when the focus was on only brakes or
the transmission or the interior. It was either carburetion or drive-shaft dynamics. You were
responsible for a certain piece of the vehicle and that’s all you worried about. Whether theparts meshed or were totally optimized was more mystery than science.
Early in the 1990s, an executive engineer in one of my seminars said the car had been reduced to  ve systems (chassis, powertrain, electronic/electrical, body, and vehicle dynamics), and was on its way to one. You mean to tell me the engine and transmission and chassis
are all one system, not separate components! Everyone was excited. The engineers had no
qualms with systems ideas; they felt that from a physical standpoint, systemic thinking was
fundamentally true.
For the engineering community, we reinforced systems concepts and added human behavior characteristics. If you put engineers from different divisions in one room, they start off
cooperating with one another. Within a few months, they hate each other because they’re all ghting for their own subsystem. None want to go back to their general manager and say,‘‘Well, I had to give a little in order for the other guy to have smoother engine performance.’’
We were able to bring engineering teams together and have them think of themselves as aninterdependent team, not separate subsystems reporting back to division champions. Con icts were resolved between the vehicle director and the division general manager, not theengineer and the division boss.

People who gained an understanding of their roles in the organization and its productas a system acted differently. The differences constituted individual changes, which led

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to pressures for organizational changes. From a systems perspective, the traditional pressures for change—simplistic cause-and-effect relationships—had to be reconsidered.
There were also implications for the results that could be attributed and claimed by thesystems and learning initiatives.
The web of interdependence and causality is very intricate. I was in that web at several
points, at several junctions in the Ford system. Were those high-leverage areas? Were they
important? Were they successful? Those remain fascinating questions.
At the beginning, the thought leaders were present for the projects. Senge and Ackoff
showed up many times and would hammer away at the principles under which the project
had to be structured. I developed condence over time; I had heard Senge and Ackoff continually reinforcing the ideas, and, in time, they started to sink in. They were genuinely authentic, grounded, and made a lot of sense. From my own prior experience with Ford, I measured
the distance between what they were saying and how things were operating. There was apretty good gap. This was a magni cent opportunity and a challenge. I was totally engrossedin the ideas and didn’t frame the big question, as the participants
did: ‘‘We get the idea; it is extremely powerful, but how are wegoing to make it meaningful?’’
We promised team members that they could probably come up
with solutions with a lot less stress and that they would enjoy
and be proud of the results. There was a leap of faith that I think
all the project participants recognized, particularly in the initialprojects when we admitted that we were learning about application at the same time they
were. We told them not to look to us for great wisdom upfront; we did not have it.
The Ford system was then operating physically and emotionally at a suboptimal level.
There was competitive behavior, holding out information, and so forth. The pressure continued and even intensi ed. So the offer of something different was pretty compelling.
Did we have a systemwide impact on Ford? I don’t know. I would like to think so. There isno evidence, however. There are many individual success stories. The evolution of this work
pointed in the direction of scale. We could articulate the need, and we could have madesome startling discoveries, but we never had the opportunity to do that. So the answer is
speculative. Did a decade of organizational learning projects in uence the company one way
or another? I see some positive evidence. There is a focus on environmental concerns. Even
though Ford has a dominant position in trucks, it has to achieve more fuel ef ciency in order
to be viable. There is a big effort to nd alternative power plants. There is consideration of
the consequences if the internal combustion engine and the transmission disappear. The
company is investing enormous sums of money in alternative fuels, hydrogen power plants,
and so forth.

Did a decade of organizational
learning projects inuence thecompany one way or another?

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Links from Glassblowing to Leading Learning
In my experience and study of personal and organizational change, I have found not onlythat people do not suddenly become someone new, but that in dramatic changes, suchas Leo’s retirement from Ford and his interest in glassblowing, there are elements of thepast in the future. Leo’s interests and pursuits in his 33 years at Ford are still found in his
current passion. On the surface, the activities have taken on a different form, but atunderlying psychological levels, they are fundamentally similar.
My transition to art has been a journey. In glassblowing, you are instantly confronted withthings that have to happen altogether in a balanced way. (From time to time, I’ll re ect on
the Ford projects for a learning analogy. The elements of measurement, assessment, and results come to mind.) My immersion in art is evolutionary. My standards are constantly
changing. When I made the very rst piece, I was pretty proud just to get something physical. You would think that it didn’t look like much. I’ve trashed many of those early pieces,although I’ve kept some. The initial achievement was to get all the forces to work together tomake something, anything.
Glassblowing is a systemic endeavor because you’re dealing with gravity, heat, liquidglass, and the reactions of your mind and body to what is happening. Everything has to  ow;
the timing has to be exact or it just doesn’t happen. You start with a three-foot-long blow

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Jeff Wrightpipe. Then you stick the blow pipe in a vat of liquid glass, which is roughly 2,200 degrees. It
is like probing a volcano. You rotate the pipe, called ‘‘gathering,’’ and eventually a clump ofliquid glass forms at the end of it. You then remove it from the furnace. If you stop turning at
any point, the glass will fall off the pipe on the  oor or on your foot. If you don’t turn at a
certain speed, the glass lumps in certain areas and thins out in others. Then, as the glass
loses its center of gravity, it spins out of control and winds up on the oor.
Your  rst challenge in becoming a glassblower is to coordinate a number of elements: how
your eye perceives what’s in front of you, how you turn the pipe, and how much glass you
gather. Meanwhile, intense heat is blasting you, and you feel like you are going to be cooked
alive. Fright makes you want to pull the pipe out of the furnace. Of course, if you do that,you lose all the molten glass you’ve gathered.
I marvel at the connections between glassblowing and the importance of thinking systemically. My understanding of systems thinking has helped me progress as a glass artist fasterthan I would have without this body of knowledge. I’ve denitely achieved a running start. I
tested this in the marketplace. Six or seven months ago, I felt that I was not ready to put a
Vic Leo piece on the market for at least another year. Then I went to a gallery and showed
the owner several of my pieces. As we chatted, I was almost apologetic, saying, ‘‘Well, I really didn’t come in here so you’d take a piece or sell any of the work. I brought samples that
represent different design techniques, and I’m looking for feedback.’’ The owner said, ‘‘Iwant all your work.’’ I was stunned.
I had compressed the learning cycle. In a short time, my art was represented and sold by agallery. I had pursued the artistic endeavor as a learner. What were the glass principles (theory)? How could I practice (application)? How could I get feedback (assessment)? What am I
going to do differently (redesign)?
Patience plays a big role in glass work. Change does not happen immediately in glass;there is a time lag between reheating and shaping (delay). If I work for an hour, half an houris devoted to preparing, setting up materials, and so on. Having an appreciation for the possibilities and the desired end result is crucial (aim¤purpose).

Using the Metaphor
Organizational scholar and management consultant Gareth Morgan has long been a proponent of using metaphors from a well-known domain to explore new areas (1986; 1997).

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Next, Leo and I reviewed the process of glassblowing to reect on the organizational
learning and change projects Leo led at Ford.
There are  ve stages in glassblowing; the rst two are gathering and shaping. The third iscreating—perhaps the most important because it produces the vase, cylinder, bowl, platter,or whatever. Fourth is annealing. You take the piece that you’ve labored on and let it sit in abox in which the temperature is roughly 950 degrees for 12 to 14 hours, gradually cooling as
the temperature in the annealer ramps down. This process takes away the thermal shock andreleases the stresses that have formed in the glass from blowing, shaping, and decorating.
The  nal,  fth stage is ne-tuning, display, and sale. It is everything you do with the pieceafter you remove it from the annealer.
How is the process similar to organizational learning? Initially, gathering is seeking out thepeople who are predisposed to creating awareness and connecting with people and the organization. In glassblowing, you connect the pipe to the pool of liquid glass and gather it. In
organizational projects, you connect with people and groups that are looking for a methodology.
The second stage, shaping, is similar to problem denition in organizational projects. What
do we want to do? What appears to be the problem here? Why are we setting out to do what
we want to do? How do we use the tools of organizational learning to shape the project?
The third stage, creating, is application and implementation. In glassblowing, you are making the object. In organizational projects, you are improving quality and productivity or gaining robustness.
Annealing has no real analogy in organizational practice. As interventionists, change
agents, and transformers, do we ever let people sit and allow thermodynamics to play themselves out? At Ford, a project always had a beginning and an end. We always stayed with thecustomer. In some cases, we catalogued the results. But there was never time after the creating process or implementation when we just sat and waited. We never thought that thechange needed to work to a state of stability. We quickly jumped to the fth stage of writing
the project up, looking for approval, and selling it as the basis for the next project.

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According to Kurt Lewin, social systems tend to be in a state of homeostasis, held in placeby forces that are in balance and create a status quo. Changes in social systems require a
readiness for change, unfreezing. Once unfrozen, the social system can adapt new ways,
using new models for behavior and the psychological safety for trying them, and thenchange happens. Quite naturally, a third step, refreezing, occurs as the people and social
system settle back to a homeostatic state (see Schein, 2002, for the three-stage change
model).
The process of annealing emphasizes the importance of gradual refreezing. While theobserved tendency of social systems to refreeze may appear to occur naturally, little
thought has been given in practice to its function as a natural, important process. Instead,organizations nish one change program and start the next one. Parts of a large organization may have multiple initiatives going on at different levels without sequencing andrefreezing. In the glassblowing metaphor, a lack of awareness of the importance of annealing fails to allow the stress to dissipate and ignores the bene ts of change and new
ways of operating.
When I thought about the glassblowing stages, I realized that there was something completely missing in the way we initiated learning and change. We started a project, createdresults, quantied them, and declared victory or some emergent benet that was good for thecompany and workforce. And we left. I don’t remember doing any annealing in organizational learning practice. After we set many dynamics in motion with these projects, weshould have had time to let the stresses work themselves out, to simply relax. We glossed
over the annealing stage. In glass, all the dynamics—the heat, the color, the shape, the coef cients, the timing, and all this stuff—must have a natural evolution of ‘‘quietness’’ so theglass can reach its nal outcome. Leaving out annealing in learning and change initiatives isa void in our understanding that should be explored.

Volume 4, Number 3, REFLECTIONSLeaving out annealing in learningand change initiatives is a void in
our understanding that should be
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To implement annealing in the corporate world is a challenge. If we return to the questionof a systemwide impact, we face the issue of how many initiatives can we do at once. Can
we get scale? There is no time to anneal the efforts you’ve already made, to let the stressresolve itself before moving forward. If you have success, youhave to go quickly to the next level. To anneal would be to
wait and let things play out.
The corporate world isn’t tolerant; it always seeks anothersolution. Very quickly, with a new CEO, Ford brought in the
GE model. I’m not knocking the GE model; I don’t know thatmuch about it, other than it came in like a gorilla. Everyone
was taught this new model and sent out on a multitude of
improvement projects. In many ways, this effort washedaway much of what we had built during a decade of learning initiatives.
This new effort quickly disassociated itself from Ford’s past. It is still a thorn in my foot,regardless of the leadership, ideology, or philosophical issues. When a new leader takes thehelm, he or she should assess the assets already in the organization. For a new plant manager, it’s like walking into a plant and  nding that certain machines are valuable assets andneed to remain because they are essential to ef ciency. There may be some things that needto change, but you should carefully assess the value of what you already have.
New CEOs who proclaim they are going to completely change the systems and the culture
are naive at best. They’d do better to keep and strengthen the strong points, work hard toeliminate the weak points, and learn new methods and practices consistent with the company’s purpose.

What Matters Most?
I asked Leo what mattered most as he reected on his career and leadership.
What we learned and created with our initiatives was a corporate asset. It was a solid value
proposition at extremely low cost. We developed our own projects, and the projects grew inscope and scale. We developed our internal people, many of whom advocated a systemic
view of the business. Our reliance on consultants was minimal because we had internal people leading and learning. The personal and business results created immense energy.
Our model was that once you had an engagement, you were part of the group. You went atfull tilt and gave full effort. What mattered most were ground-level results —development ofpeople and the organization. The other things I tried, such as the Leaders for Learning andleveraging process leadership’s role in reengineering, were important initiatives, but I’m notsure if I had an authentic relationship with senior executives.

I noted that we needed to carefully judge Leo’s efforts and Ford’s progress. The initiatives undertaken were all locally successful. People were engaged and they learned;
the business proted. Does being the person who led the program that rolled through thecorporation matter most? Implicit in our conversation was the notion of being able toclaim that he had changed everybody in the corporation. Leo commented:
That’s a very seductive concept. Without a doubt, the greatest fuel for motivation and excitement was the intensity that we had in each project. It was marvelous to see and work in. Yet,in a large corporation like Ford, the idea that we needed to grow systems thinking and organizational learning kept pushing us along.
From a systemic viewpoint, we set a lot in motion. It wasn’t wasted work to in uence asystem and its people to have more awareness of their interdependency. I believe systemic
thinking is powerful. Eventually, it is the road many corporations will travel. For my deepest
wish, I want Ford to be one of those companies. I think systems thinking has great benet forthe company’s longevity and its contribution to society.

Leo’s preceding words are a good summary for what he accomplished at Ford. From
the known outcomes of learning projects, signi cant business accomplishments and personal results were achieved. Other efforts ourished for a time, each contributing in someways to the goals of the company. The relative costs and bene ts are unknown. Those

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efforts were not overtly sustained when a new program swept through Ford.3 Does thatrule out their effectiveness?
Re ection on the decade of effort on learning and change leaves some questions.
How can the process of engaging a team or division in developing its learning grow inscale to a large corporation? By what standards do we assess systemic change? What canand should we expect in terms of business change and transformation of its people? Howmuch time should an organization have to anneal the learning and change that has occurred in order to provide a foundation for future growth and development?

Notes
1. This is described in F. Simon et al., ‘‘Creating a Learning Lab—and Making It Work’’ in The Fifth
Discipline Fieldbook, eds. P. Senge et al. (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1994): 554–560.
2. See P. Senge et al. The Dance of Change (New York: Doubleday Currency, 1999): 167–173.
3. See ‘‘Driving Change: An Interview with Ford Motor Company’s Jacques Nasser.’’ Harvard Business Review 77, no. 2 (March–April 1999): 76–88.

References
Morgan, G. Images of Organizations; Imaginization: New Mindsets of Seeing, Organizing and Managing (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1986, 1997).
Schein, E. ‘‘Models and Tools for Stability and Change in Human Systems.’’ Re ections 4 (Winter2002): 34–46.

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