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Purple Line Associates

“Learning. Change. By Design.”

November 16, 2008 Doing Good Work

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.

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November 10, 2008 NRG Systems (Yet another reason to love Vermont)

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.

November 2, 2008 Translating mission into practice

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.

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October 30, 2008 Policy and Practice: A reading of Michael Pollan

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.

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October 7, 2007 The Reflective Practitioner

I am reading Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner, which I highly recommend to anyone interested in understanding some of the important “soft stuff” of individual and organizational performance. Schon’s work is part of the line of thinking behind my approach to understanding how social responsibility evolves within organizations.

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.

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July 1, 2007 A leadership brand that includes social responsibility

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.

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May 28, 2007 The trust dilemma

A recent story in the business section of the Chicago Tribune highlighted the growth of a local natural pet food business — Evanger’s Dog and Cat Food Company — in the wake of pet-food recalls and the melamine issue.

The good news is that companies like Evanger’s are emerging and growing, creating a more sustainable business model and alternative for consumers (Evanger’s offerings include an organic line). The challenge is in the growth part. Part of the Evanger model is buying locally, a strategy that is designed to ensure quality. But when you dig deeper under the “quality” attribute, what you get is trust. Evanger VP Joel Sher explained in the Tribune piece:

“You’ve got to know your suppliers and the kind of people they are. With the local ones, you can know as much as you want to know. You can visit them.”

That’s a very different kind of trust than, say, trusting that an FDA reference number on a supplier’s product specifications means that it really is what is says it is (one of the root issues of the melamine problem). Getting to know “the kind of people” your suppliers are is a practice that depends on all of your cognitive capabilities — your expertise, your beliefs and your emotions. And – it’s time consuming.

Wherein lies the trust dilemma. How do you scale your business rapidly when it depends on a time-consuming, very human process of developing trust?

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April 27, 2007 Deep listening, empathy and sustainability

I am attending the Business as an Agent of World Benefit Online Conference 2007, hosted by the Center for Business as an Agent of World Benefit at Case Western Reserve University. One of this afternoon’s keynote presentations by given by Chris Laszlo, a partner in the firm Sustainable Value Partners. Once again, I heard the theme of how successful, socially responsible companies are relying on a deep understanding of their customers and customer environments (“deep listening” in Chris’s words) to establish innovative new businesses. It’s the same theme driven home to me at Green Festival Chicago and from research shared in this blog.

Chris walked us through the state of change occurring (at a global level) as companies begin to explore the meaning of “sustainable” business models. The sweet spot for sustainability is where an organization simultaneously creates high value for both shareholders and stakeholders. Anything outside of that sweet spot puts the organization at risk (i.e., a non-sustainable position). For example: A chemical goods company was providing shareholder value and was entirely compliant with current environmental regulations. But it did not foresee an upcoming backlash (by a corporate customer) against a byproduct produced by one of its products. Had the company been more vigilant in scanning the stakeholder environment, it may have reduced the impact of this situation by addressing it earlier.

Chris also hit on the theme of base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) markets as being an engine of innovation. Check out the company Wizzit, which is using cell phones to establish a new model for banking in South Africa — reaching those who had no access to banking services before.
From Chris’s experience working in this new sustainability space, there are several lessons for managers. Chris’s final slide from the presentation sums up these lessons [emphasis is mine]:

Sustainability provides new insights into business strategy and the competitive environment

  • A “lens” through which managers can innovate along their extended supply chains
  • Sustainability is not about trade-offs. Investments can have paybacks of < 2 years
  • Moral responsibility remains the foundation but not the primary motivator for action

Sustainability solutions require collaboration with stakeholders

  • Partnering with stakeholders can reduce opposition and bring new knowledge
  • Effective stakeholder relationships take into account perceptions and emotions
  • Managers must accept that they cannot please all stakeholders all the time

Sustainability solutions need new organizational competencies

  • Skills include assessing and managing stakeholder impacts along the supply chain
  • Many companies lack the organizational capacity for listening and empathy
  • Supporting activities include social marketing, sales training and government lobbying

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April 19, 2007 Sustainable change and identity

This afternoon I attended part of an on-going lecture series offered by Northwestern University’s Center for Learning and Organizational Change. Today’s session explored the question “when is change transformational?” and was presented by Dorie Blesoff, a faculty member in Northwestern’s Master’s program in Learning and Organizational Change, and Pat Allen, an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute.

Dorie and Pat actually facilitated a discussion around two questions: When is change transformational, and what makes that change sustainable? (Dorie noted the paradox embedded in that question – if the change is sustained, it’s no longer a change; it’s a new state. But that’s fodder for another posting…).

This is a long preamble to the insight gained at the table discussion in which I participated. All of the lecture participants broke into groups of 3 or 4 to share “transformational” change moments, and to explore what common themes that emerged in our brief narratives. The group that I participated in ended up landing on “identity” as the common thread through all of our stories. They were all about being and not just doing or changing. Something happened, it inspired change, and that led to the emergence of a new identity (the sustainable outcome of the change).

I share this because it strikes me as a reasonable way to think about the type of large-scale change that leaders like Jeffrey Hollender allude to when they challenge companies to stop “compartmentalizing” social responsibility and make it more intrinsic to the corporate identity. It’s not only about thinking differently, perhaps, but also about embracing an identity which says ” we are different.”

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April 17, 2007 It’s about thinking differently

More from Jeffrey Hollender, the CEO of Seventh Generation. In the company’s blog (The Inspired Protagonist), Hollender takes a poke at Wal-Mart in his post What is it they still don’t get?

What I particularly like is his clarity on what is at the root of this. Hollender writes:

“It’s sad to see one of the greatest ‘potential’ forces for a more sustainable planet continue to undermine itself. Wal-Mart is on a dangerous see saw. One day, there’s good news, and the next it’s bad. This is a characteristic of too many large companies (BP and Merrill Lynch to name a few others) as they confine their sustainability and responsible business initiatives to a limited number of highly compartmentalized efforts.

These ‘non-system’ activities create as much reputational risk as they do opportunity. Until any company looks at its entire business and develops a ‘whole’ effort to manage all aspects of its activities with an integrated point of view there is little or no chance of sustained success. This is about changing the way we think, how we think, and what we think about.“ [emphasis mine]

This resonates a great deal with the thinking and research I’ve explored in this blog. I can go back to the executives I interviewed as part of my Master’s thesis research. Two sets of manager interviews were at companies that “compartmentalized” social responsibility. One set of interviews was in a company that clearly had a “whole” approach. Interviews with the “whole” approach company stood out in a material way. They:
- Explicitly characterized themselves as “different,” and used that to help establish new thinking.
- Used social mission as an engine for innovations that were intrinsic to the business, across all operations.
- Had continuous conversations and reflections across the company to help interpret how to convert social mission into operations in a consistent and valid manner.

The more I continue this investigation, the more I see the breadth, depth and consistency of these types of conversations as a leading indicator of whether a company is truly on the path to thinking differently. Were I to design an organizational intervention to accelerate the process of change to a “whole” mentality, it would focus on activities and tools that help create and inspire these conversations.

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