Nearly two years ago, I wrote a the white paper A Strategic Design Approach to Workplace Learning and Knowledge Development. Since that time, I have continued to develop my thinking around these ideas while teaching in the Master’s Program in Learning and Organizational Change at Northwestern University.
This blog is where I will continue to my work in this area, and the impact this “designer’s mindset” has in projects that I am involved in.
One of the concepts that is capturing my attention more lately is the relationship between identity and learning. Everyone looks to intrinsic motivation to drive new learning — but rarely do people focus on identity as the key. It’s the difference between learning to cook, and learning to be “a cook.”
The reason I am noodling this at the moment is I am working through the best way to help The Talking Farm find a scalable model to do more urban, organic farming in the local area (Evanston and Skokie, IL). I really think there is something in providing people with a motivational identity to achieve — urban organic farmer, apprentice farmer, urban foodie — that has local meaning and cache. More to come…
Worth the review: The Green Building Impact Report.
I’ve just begun a read of this, but am already seeing this as an exemplar case study in large-scale, cross-organizational change. We need a LEED effort for food…for transportation…
What is most fascinating to me (and I need to dive into this further) is the fact that the LEED effort has strong links to a particular profession (or set of related professions) — architecture and the building professions.
One of the things we look at in organizational change is the impact of communities of practice, or networks of practice — those people who share a common language and way of thinking that is associated with a profession. That common ground and interest connects them in a way that is productive, and once there is a change afoot, this community can become a catalyst for it or a barrier to it. So — what makes it work? And why has it worked for architects and builders, but not for — say — automotive engineers? Or farmers?
If I had to hypothesize, I am sure it is the combination of several factors (the structure of the architecture and building industry is not the same as the auto industry or farming, for example).
But underneath this is the question that everyone seems to want to get at. We’ve got lots of parts of industries that “get it” and are moving toward more sustainable practices. What does it take to get real traction, in the sense the kind of productivity and results produced by LEED certification?
It starts with language, persistence and patience.
Over coffee this past Friday with one of the founders of The Talking Farm I found myself repeating this point-of-view as we were discussing what it would take to make a state-wide change toward more sustainable practices in growing, processing, distributing and consuming food.
There are of course many skills and capabilities that contribute to an entrepreneur’s or leader’s ability to successfully translate mission into practice (“practice” meaning what people actually do — and changing practices to achieve some new desirable outcome is usually the object of the mission). But there is a line of thinking in the study of learning and organizational change that language, persistence and patience pay off for some very good reasons.
Take the example of a very successful, mission-oriented community bank. In his narrative of the bank’s success in actually delivering on its mission, one of the founders told me how they consistently pressed to follow the simple guideline of “every loan we make must have a community development benefit.” The language is clear. It’s not some loans, it’s every loan. And the judgment of success rests primarily on community benefit.
This guideline did not eliminate or undermine the importance of other attributes of successful loans (acceptable risk, profitability, regulatory compliance, etc.). What the guideline did was set up a “both/and” challenge to the bank’s staff — at the practice level (what they did day-to-day). We need to write really good loans that also have a community development payoff.
So part one of the success was doing a good job of translating mission (“successful socially conscious community bank”) into a practice that can begin to impact individual’s mental models of good day-to-day practice. Part two was the persistence and patience. What many leaders often fail to adequately grasp is that change doesn’t happen when the leaders “get it” and have figured out the new way of thinking and doing; change happens when the organization gets it. The bigger the organization (or system) you are trying to change, the more patience you need to allow the organization to learn and accept new practices.
The study of learning and organizational change provides one point-of-view on the logic behind this. I’d argue it this way. “Practice” — what we actually do to get something done — is based in large part on people’s mental models of the activity. If you want a banker to change their way of thinking about loans from being primarily about “make the most money” or “make it the lowest risk” to “achieve community benefit” the you need to help each individual banker adapt that new way of thinking into their own existing mental model. That’s both an individual and social process; people develop meaning and understanding in the context of the social nature of practice. Banker A goes to Banker B and says, “hey, I’ve got this loan I’m looking at…do you think it meets the mark for community benefit?” A conversation happens. Meaning develops.
And all of this takes time. It seems that effective leaders are those who know how to develop guidelines that help frame these conversations and practiced-based interactions around the right topics. But they also know they need to stick with it; reinforce the development of meaning that fits with the mission by constantly challenging people to think and develop their own expertise in the new practices.
For me, the test of whether all of this is working is whether the organization is taking the leader’s guidelines and doing something with it in practice that is both positive and something that the leader never would have envisioned on their own.
If you are like me and educating yourself on the systems underlying our un-sustainable behavior, reading Michael Pollan is an exercise in making the complex more approachable. In particular I am thinking about Pollan’s most recent piece in the New York Times Magazine, An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief.
First of all I admire Pollan’s ability as a writer. But his most important skill, I think, is in expertly crafting a narrative that helps us get at two important things:
1) A model — a way of thinking about a complex issue that is profoundly simple, and powerful in the way it helps guide us in a productive direction. “We need to wean the American food system off itsheavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine.” Think about the power of the idea behind that model of thinking. What if we evaluated all of our food policy decisions on the basis of “does it increase or greatly accelerate our use of sunshine as a primary energy source?”
2) The link between policy and practice (and by “practice” I mean things that people actually do to get something done). A lot of what Pollan writes about in the “Open Letter” piece is a compelling story linking the establishment of policy and the resulting behaviors and practices.
On the latter point — the link between policy and practice — what I like most about the way he writes about it is that he appears to have a healthy respect for the ability to understand the power behind crafting policy. As with anything that is a powerful tool, it can be good, bad or confusing. Good policy moves us forward (ok…there is judgment behind what “move us forward” means…it requires a point of view…) — but in the end, good policy takes current context into consideration and good policy crafters have an understanding that context changes and therefore policies may run their course.
Read Pollan’s piece to understand the importance of look at our entire food production chain as a key issue in sustainability. But also read it as an example of deeply understanding the power of good models and good policy.
In his book, Schon looks deeply at several examples of expert practitioners helping more junior counterparts work through a problem. He does this to gain insight into how the experts think about fuzzy problems (i.e., an expert architect working with a student on a building design problem).
What he ends up with is “reflection-in-action,” which he defines as a structured process of “reflective conversation with a unique and uncertain situation.” Experts use their repertoire of experience and knowledge to reframe the problem into one which they believe they can solve, then test the consequences and implications of this reframing. This yields new problems, discoveries and opportunities — leading to additional reflection-in-action. Schon pictures experts literally conversing with the problem in this interative fashion.
In summary, experts are really good at reframing problems into something they can solve. But the process with fuzzy problems is not a reframing that yields “this is x, therefore y” but “this looks like x; let’s compare the two and see what happens.” The result is experimentation and new insights which lead to a solution through many interations.
How do experts get that way? Actual experience is critical (an expert’s “repertoire” only evolves from actually doing). But Schon’s examples of expert practitioners working with their junior counterparts also sheds light on the importance of an apprentice-like social interaction. By jointly working on fuzzy problems with experts, the junior practitiioners get in-the-moment insight into the expert’s reframing process and begin to construct their own unique version of this critical cognitive activity.
