Social Business Design: Coaction as an impelling force http://ow.ly/XjAa #KM #KMers /via @weknowmore

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?

I am fascinated by the conditions under which people successfully perform “good work” — and I’ll unashamedly steal the definition of good work as “a calling that combines excellent performance, expresses one’s ethics and offers a pleasing sense of engagement” [taken from the Donald Goleman article in the Sunday Business section of this past week's New York Times].

Goleman’s piece pays homage to the work of Howard Gardner and peers in the Good Works Project, a collaboration of several great minds tackling an issue worthy of their capabilities:

“The GoodWork® Project is a large scale effort to identify individuals and institutions that
exemplify good work—work that is excellent in quality, socially responsible, and meaningfulto its practitioners—and to determine how best to increase the incidence of good work in our society.”

Goleman is the author of Emotional Intelligence and, through that effort and his subsequent work, a significant voice in the understanding of work, practice, cognition and emotion. And if you doubt the connection and power behind the integration of those elements, just Google “Obama.”

In any event, Goleman’s piece in the NY Times tells the story of Govan Brown, an New York bus driver and Deacon of a local Baptist church who elegantly (and with an astonishingly large dose of American ingenuity) combined his personal ethics with his “job” transporting people along a bus route in midtown Manhattan. His story is — once again — the story of the possible. The context is different, but the underlying concepts are the same, I think, as the story of Jan Blittersdorf and NRG Systems of Vermont (or pick any one of the employees of NRG Systems).

It is the same story I heard from Colleen Barrett, the President of Southwest Airlines who spoke at a recent Winning Workplaces conference. Colleen talked a lot about living by the principle of the Golden Rule — a common element of her upbringing that she shared with Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher. What they believed — and executed — is a vision based on positive possibilities.

None of these stories are exactly the same in the way they play out. The protagonists draw their inspiration and guidance from different sources. But the underlying spirit shares common ground — a strong belief in the power of positive actions, executed in innovative fashion.

I had the opportunity to hear Jan Blittersdorf, CEO of NRG Systems, speak at a recent Winning Workplaces conference honoring this year’s Top Small Workplaces (a joint effort between Winning Workplaces and the Wall Street Journal).

Small, successful workplaces can be tremendous examples of what’s possible — and the impact of consistently improving on a theme through innovative thinking. In NRG’s case, an example is how they live the value of “environmental stewardship.”

Read the interview with Jan Blittersdorf from a recent issue of Wind Energy News and watch this piece produced by Seven Days. You’ll begin to get a sense of the inspiration that can be found in such organizations.

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.

The July/August issue of Harvard Business Review includes an article by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood entitled “Building a Leadership Brand” that I believe contains lessons for learning and development professionals working toward ingraining more socially responsible practices into their organizations.

Ulrich and Smallwood argue that organizations must define leadership competencies that are meaningful to their unique brand promise — in other words, that the leadership competency model is not made up of generic competencies that might be applied to any organization. This has long been a troublesome point for me in working with organizations trying to define competency models. It’s hard work to define (and gain agreement on) a set of competencies that clearly articulate who WE are and how we should operate — but isn’t differentiation the core of competitive advantage? Why do we insist on believing that differentiating our products or services is meaningful, but it’s okay to develop generic leaders?

This point of view holds lessons for learning and development practitioners who may be looking for opportunities to contribute to sustainability or other socially responsible business practices. Ulrich and Smallwood argue — correctly — that a leadership competency model should be viewed as a translation of brand image into a vision of desired leadership thinking and behavior. And it must be defined in a manner that brings clarity to the meaning of that thinking or behavior in the context of each organization.

For an organization that wishes to make socially responsible practices part of the DNA of the organization, it follows that any substantive “brand” effort related to products or services should be backed up by similar “brand” expectations of socially responsible leadership. What exactly do we mean by “ethical” leadership, or leading with a triple-bottom line mind?

It’s also clear from the Ulrich/Smallwood piece (as well as my own experience) that the value of a well-crafted competency model is not really in the model itself. It’s in the leadership development activities that it inspires. The competency model provides the design specifications for learning and development practitioners to get really creative in constructing activities and support systems which can turn a socially responsible vision into actual leadership practice.