Tag Archives: cognition

Sustainable change and identity

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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.”

It’s about thinking differently

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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.

More on Gardner’s five minds

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Why is it important to look at thought pieces like Howard Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future, which really deals with describing positive, individual cognitive capabilities? In my view, this is an important (but often overlooked) aspect of understanding the driving forces behind organizational change. Let’s look at ethical principles as an example.

A previous post on the growing consensus on codes of conduct describes the work of several researchers (published in Harvard Business Review) who suggest that there are eight key principles that guide world-class ethical standards. These include:

Dignity principle: Respect the dignity of all people. Protect the health, safety, privacy and human rights of others; refrain from coercion; and adopt practices that enhance human development in the workplace, the marketplace and the community.

Citizenship principle: Act as responsible citizens of the community. Respect the law, protect public goods, cooperate with public authorities, avoid improper involvement in politics and government, and contribute to community betterment.

These principles are only meaningful to the extent that they are internalized (i.e., become operative and active parts of an individual’s mental models) and acted upon by members of the organization. The dignity principle comes alive via Gardner’s “respectful mind,” which notes and welcomes differences between human individuals and groups and seeks to work effectively with them. The citizenship principle would largely depend on development of Gardner’s “ethical mind,” which ponders the nature of one’s work and the needs of society.
One could make similar relationships between Gardner’s respectful and ethical minds and other CSR principles. Donna Wood describes the “Principle of Public Responsibility” for businesses, which states that businesses are responsible for outcomes related to their primary and secondary areas of involvement with society. An organization must be led by and composed of individuals with the cognitive capabilities described in the “ethical mind” to sort through the difficult and ambiguous territory related to this principle.

The critical point here is to look at living such principles as, in part, an exercise in architecting organizational activities and practices to develop the respectful and ethical minds. In his book, Gardner writes a bit about this in the concluding chapters. Developing these minds takes individual reflection (am I making progress, each year?); clear alignment on mission and purpose (do we have the same, positive goal?); and the presence of role models who live and reinforce respectful and ethical practices (how do high performers act?).

My reading of his insights also suggests that this is best done within the context of one’s professional discipline (e.g., marketing, sales, etc.). Excellence in the work products that are part of a profession is related to an individual’s development within Gardner’s other three minds: the disciplined mind, the synthesizing mind and the creative mind. And to develop any of those is at least a 10-year effort (Gardner’s general benchmark) for deep understanding of a profession, trade or discipline. Thinking “ethically” as a marketing professional must incorporate a effective integration of the ethical viewpoint within the deep expertise of the professional capabilities that produce excellence in work effort.
When you look at the success cases of individuals who represent the best of socially responsible business practices, I suspect you will find clear evidence of that integration of respect, ethics and professional expertise.