Caterfly Blogs

Tag: self-organisation

  • Why do Organisations need more trained Facilitators?

    Why do Organisations need more trained Facilitators?

    What trained Open Space Technology Facilitators could do for Organisations

    Many companies suffer from a lack of cohesion and connectedness. Managers and staff alike generally lack a holistic view of their organisation in terms of its internal flow of energy and value creation. Most people in organisations do not have a full view of what goes on across the organisation, and the executives at the top may have an overview of the various departments, but generally have little understanding of what the issues are at the shop floor level.

    This lack of a multi-disciplinary and holistic view of their own organisation is manifest in the way departments and teams often work in very entrenched silo mentalities. Silos produce poor cross-departmental collaboration and pan-organisational coherence. The situation is particularly acute in Western companies where people typically specialise in one area of work and then stay in their field – if they do move on, they tend to go on to similar work elsewhere, changing company rather than changing type of work.

    This contrasts to Asian firms, in particular Japanese, where people are routinely rotated to different departments, irrespective of their specialities, typically in 2-5 year cycles, so that as they become more senior, irrespective of position, they gain a good understanding of how the company works and in particular are sympathetic to the various perspectives as seen from different parts of the organisation – in short they also become generalists with a holistic view of the organisation and its place in society, they are the bridges and glue of the whole.

    In the West we tend to put resources in tools like process improvements, particularly at a team level. Agile implementations and moves towards business agility are examples of current day efforts to improve team effectiveness, and thus the ability to add value for customers in a speedy, flexible and iterative way. Which is all great, but this happens at a team or section level, with ‘high performing’ teams often rewarded irrespective of whether their high performance is actually beneficial to the smooth operation of the whole organisation as a whole. This is like putting a high performing Rolls Royce engine in a Volkswagen Beetle chassis – this would prove untenable, the Beetle was never designed to cope with the power of the RR engine, the whole would crumble in the long run. Likewise interventions are usually isolated and do not tackle the challenge of getting the organisation to operate more effectively and coherently as one whole.

    Moreover, an organisation is only as effective as its weakest link, so concentrating resources on some priority teams while largely ignoring others, or while not considering how this might effect the whole, can actually dampen the overall organisational effectiveness. Even with balanced high performing teams there is often no engagement model in place that guarantees that all teams are operating in tandem towards the same purpose. One often finds teams competing with each other internally, or unknowingly duplicating efforts.

    So how could we get more pan-organisational collaboration, cohesion and innovation across the organisation, without switching to an Asian style rotation system, (which would take a full generation before its benefits became apparent, so hardly feasible)? What could we do to enable more pan-organisational coherence and collaboration, and for everyone to start thinking about their organisation more holistically? Why aren’t organisations putting more resources into developing such pan-organisational cohesion?

    There may be several reasons:

    • a general lack of awareness of the need for it (it is not on people’s minds first and foremost)
    • organisations having no experience in trying to achieve coherence
    • no knowledge or expertise within the organisation on how to do it
    • nobody knowing how to “plan” the thousands of conversations that would need to happen to enable pan-organisational exchange
    • likewise nobody in the organisation knowing, for instance, how to run large-scale participatory meetings, instead only relying speaker-centered conferences or motivational talks (which by nature are non-participatory)
    • No understanding for ‘unplanning’ conversations to engender serendipitous or emergent conversations
    • in a mechanistic view of the organisation open-ended chaordic interventions seen as a waste of time, with the bureaucratic command and control approach asserting itself
    • similarly innovation viewed as something best left to the ‘innovation specialists’ – unfortunately many a bright idea from staff, coming from a place of understanding the customer, gets sidelined with this attitude.

    Clearly we need pan-organisational models of engagement. These do exist. They can be found in practices such as Presencing Theatre, World Cafe, Appreciative Enquiry, Circle Ways, The Art of Hosting and many other participatory approaches also collated in Liberating Structures. The most open-ended and engaging approach of them all, however, which really allows genuine pan-organisational conversations that matter to emerge, is Open Space Technology (commonly Open Space), the structure used in ‘Unconference’, ‘Hackathon‘ and ‘BarCamp’ events. While there are many ways to run concurrent conversations, Open Space Technology does this particularly well at scale, and is ideal in larger organisations needing cross-departmental exchange at all levels simultaneously.

    Open Space Technology, commonly Open Space, is a method for hosting highly participatory, large group, whole-system collaboration based on self-organisation in which participants themselves co-create the agenda, experience and outcomes that matter to them. Click here to see our article What is Open Space Technology?

    The components of Open Space graphic

    Open Space Technology is described in more detail elsewhere. My purpose here is to encourage larger organisations to use Open Space Technology much more frequently and for them to hire or train a few internal facilitators who can actually run Open Space Tech events within their organisation. There is no reason why an Open Space Tech event should be a one-off occasion. If organisations want genuine agility in their organisations, then running Open Space events should be a regular occurrence.

    Open Space Technology has many benefits (see Beyond unConferences) but in the context of pan-organisational collaboration, innovation and coherence Open Space Technology enables cross-fertilisation of ideas and cross-collaboration across departments in a highly interactive environment at once on a massive scale. An Open Space event can lead collectively to a holistic re-energising of the whole organisation, creating conditions for the organisation to thrive organically. Moreover it can be a massive and long-lasting boost to staff engagement and morale, largely because deep conversations that matter to them can take place. These vital conversations are rarely had in organisations, and yet are hugely necessary for people within the organisation to flourish.

    The benefits of using pan-organisational Open Space Tech for organisations are:

    • it helps bridge departments, and thus breaks down silos, encouraging collaboration rather than internal competition
    • it stimulates over time a systems view of the organisation amongst all staff, thus facilitating constructive dialogue between different parts of the organisation
    • it shifts everyone into an ‘innovation mode‘ and elevates the creativity of the whole organisation; this enables complex problem-solving and disruptive innovation
    • it is a brilliant basis for invitation-based culture change
    • it represents a highly effective model of engagement, rejuvenating staff co-creativity
    • it enables expanded stakeholder dialogues to take place involving the wider organisation
    • it enables conversations to emerge which could never have been planned
    • it encourages the emergence of new ideas and concepts otherwise inconceivable
    • Its self-organising, autonomous and peer-learning format forms the basis for creating a learning organisation.

    Ultimately Open Space Tech enables thousands of meaningful conversations to happen serendipitously at scale and across the organisation that otherwise would never have happened and would have been impossible to plan, all within a limited time scale (1-2 days)

    So given Open Space Technology has so many advantages, why is it not used more frequently in organisations? What are the stumbling blocks? Some have already been mentioned earlier, but here are few as more:

    • it can be logistically demanding, the larger the number of invitees, the better, but also the more demanding it is to organise; Open Space Tech has no limit to size (other than the capacity of venue)
    • a general lack of awareness, or a perceived weirdness of the process
    • poor quality of facilitators (wanting to ‘manage’ the process, combine it or trying to ‘improve’ it)
    • unpredictable outcome can be scary
    • perceived costs (in fact Open Space Tech is a lot cheaper, but like a plane crash it sounds big when it happens)
    • for most managers not having a clear agenda feels rather frightening.

    Facilitator introduces an Open Space event. Martin GrimshawThis lack of a clear agenda (the agenda is created by the participants on the spot at the start of an Open Space Event) is probably the biggest stumbling block within commercial organisations, as managers and sponsors are often expected to state clearly what the anticipated outcomes of such a meeting should be (in order to justify the funding for it, for instance). Yet that is precisely the catch 22. Open Space Technology relies on emergence, serendipity and new creative solutions to whatever challenges brought the people together to the Open Space event in the first place. Agendas pre-define solutions, they pre-determine outcomes and as such they stifle emergence. The whole point of Open Space Technology without pre-set agendas is to enable issues to emerge which would otherwise never have arisen.

    Agendas kill emergence and thereby also stifle innovation and motivation. People feel caged in by (other people’s) agendas. Yet for managers coming from a mechanical view of business, “agendalessness” is most difficult to fathom. Managers will almost always want to interfere and include some agenda. It is ironic that in our times when leaders are crying for more staff engagement, collaboration, participation, accountability and innovation, they are also imposing more agendas, the very thing that kills all those virtues. Agendas create precisely those conditions which disengage people. The only agenda that works is one created by ALL those participating there and then, in the here and now, in a free market-place where people can opt in and out of the authentic conversations.

    To be blunt: As a manager you can either have engagement and innovation, or you can have agendas and outcomes, but you cannot have both – they cancel each other out. So if agendas and outcomes are what you want, fine, don’t use Open Space Technology, but don’t expect engagement and innovation either. If engagement and innovation are what you want, however, then you have to be willing to let go of any agenda, or rather let the staff and workers determine and deliberate their own issues.
    The Law Of Two Feet as butterfly wings and rainbow colours
    Annette Zera: The Law of Two Feet

    For this reason, it is important that some people in the organisation know how to run Open Space Technology events. In particular they need to fully understand the issues around invitations, agendas, co-creation and emergence. It needs people who can resist what many managers want, such as adding items to an agenda in advance. Because Open Space Tech meetings operate on the basis of opt-in invitation, people will only feel inspired to join a meeting, if it is about an issue that concerns them, is burning for them, and is not laden with pre-conceived solutions which do not address their perspective. Open Space Tech facilitators need to have a thorough understanding of the role of invitation (versus imposition) and the effect of agendas on the matter.

    There is a general need for organisations to have more facilitators and facilitative leaders, if organisations are to thrive (through innovation and collaboration). But they should also have an Open Space Tech facilitator or two at hand. While more general facilitators or organisational development practitioners are in a good position to introduce people-centric participatory next stage ways of organising and working to the organisation, there should ideally be someone who is specifically able to bring about a pan-organisational, cross-functional and holistic understanding of, and engagement in, the organisation through Open Space Technology. What is needed are facilitators who can bring about internal flexibility and agility by calling Open Space events at short notice, while also understanding the importance of creating a safe and transparent environment for emergence to happen, opening and holding the space.

    In the long run Open Space Technology can set some foundations for the organisation to shift from a mechanical command-and-control perspective to a more living, organic and responsive one, one able tocontinuously adapt and learn. Larger organisations should therefore have one or two internal Open Space Tech facilitators. Ideally organisations should be operating in a permanent Open Space Tech mode or mindset all the time, and having an Open Space Tech facilitator on board who can keep that spirit alive would be nothing but beneficial.

     

  • The Issue with Hierarchy

    The Issue with Hierarchy

    First published at Medium https://medium.com/@f12uk/the-issue-with-hierarchy-a986f62963a5

     

    Nowadays discussions about hierarchy abound, especially in organisations, some arguing you need hierarchy to run an organisation, otherwise you have chaos, while others deploring the negative effects of hierarchy, such as stifling innovation, or treating humans as mechanical cogs. These debates have come to the fore with the advent of self-organising structures, self-managing organisations and more recently the hubbub around companies without bosses, networks without hierarchies, and so on.

    There is no doubt that militaristic hierarchy can be toxic, especially when fostering independent creativity, innovation and autonomous problem-solving, (and I’m fully aligned with those who have a natural aversion to hierarchy as it is often applied.) Yet it seems to me just abolishing hierarchy, as many movements are trying to do, is somewhat misguided, missing the point, throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

    Hierarchy can fundamentally be viewed as a thought tool or a cognitive skill, which enables humans to group things, ideas and concepts into categories. This ability to categorise allows us to build new constructs and prioritise things. Anyone who has ever tried to have a discussion with someone who sees the world as if it were flat, unable to distinguish between different levels of thinking, comparing dogs with animals, knows what I mean.

    In fact our ability to categorise into meta-levels and create higher and lower orders of categories is a fundamental feature of our human ability to think, it is what has enabled science and technology to progress, it is what has enabled humans to evolve, for better or worse. Hierarchies represent different levels of abstraction. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with hierarchy per se.

    Where things have gone pear-shaped, however, is where hierarchy has been hijacked by bullies seeking power. Associating power with hierarchy is probably related to Christian body-mind split, and the view that the mind is of a ‘higher order’ needing to control the body, treating the body as if it were some mindless loose morass which would run amok if not controlled.

    Views have changed, and there is a societal awareness of the toxicity and counter-productivity of this hierarchical power paradigm. It is hence not surprising that so many people are skeptical of anything that smacks of hierarchy. And when associated with power, justifiably so. However, when blindly rejecting hierarchy indiscriminately on that basis, there is a danger that we do throw the human baby and our core ability to think & prioritise out with the water at the same time.

    My view is that hierarchy should be allowed to live, even in human structures, as long it is used as a tool, and not as a rule (or as a way to rule). As I said, it is not hierarchy itself which intrinsically bad, but the misuse of it to serve the personal purposes of some domineering people.

    Unfortunately organisational hierarchy is normally illustrated with the boss at the top reigning over the various branches, the ‘subordinates’, who replicate the same structure further below. I prefer to draw organisational diagrams, if at all, the other way round, with the ‘highest’ level at the bottom, branching upwards, holding space and nurturing the ‘lower’ levels at the top, where the main value creating activities of the organisation are performed. This way customers, shop-floor staff and suppliers are no longer governed by corporate bosses and shareholders ruling at the top, but are themselves the main players, supported by co-ordinating stewards now at the bottom.

    The purpose of hierarchy in human organising became very clear to me from the work of Edwin John in India with his Children’s and Neighbourhood parliaments. Edwin John has spent a lifetime empowering both children and local communities through local ‘parliaments’. These neighbourhood parliaments get together regular to make their own decisions about things affecting their communities.

    Imagine a village, a street, and a neighbourhood say of 20 houses, whose residents meet regularly to determine key aspects in the community (street cleaning, education, sewage etc). With 200 houses in the street there may thus be around 20 such community parliaments. Let’s say now there is a matter concerning the whole street, this affects the other 20 neighbourhood parliaments, and all communities in the street have to be involved in the decision-making. It is difficult to have meetings of 200 households — the more people involved, the more cumbersome meetings become.

    So what Edwin John has done is to have each community elect a representative of each circle, of each neighbourhood parliament. The representatives of each community then meet to decide at a street level, each representative representing their community who elected them, thus creating a meta-circle. By nature this is now a new ‘higher’ level of hierarchy.

    This does not automatically mean, however, that the meta-level has power over the community they represent. Indeed to ensure this does not happen Edwin John has given each community the right to recall their representative and elect someone else, if they feel he or she is no longer representing the community. Not in 4 year’s time, but immediately! This is very different from the kind of representation UK parliamentary representatives see themselves taking on, who once elected seem to take things into own hands. In Edwin John’s neighbourhood hierarchy the essence of governance is still very much at the local level, and hierarchy is used as a bridging tool between communities.

    So we have here an example where hierarchy is being used benevolently, with huge positive effect. So when thinking of hierarchy, rather than throwing the baby out with bathwater, I invite you to use this example to reframe the way we use hierarchy in human organisations. This is in my view closer to the kind of cognitive hierarchy I mentioned at the beginning.

    This is not always easy, but whenever we get stuck, or start falling into the trap of treating hierarchy as power-over rather than power-with or different levels of abstraction, we should remind ourselves of the purpose of the hierarchy, starting from the local. Turn the hierarchy upside down, so that the visionaries “at the top” are now stewards at the bottom serving the community, the shop-floor and the ‘locals’ adding value.

    The recall button is key to keeping hierarchy away from the hungry wolves. Rather than just throwing hierarchy out completely and losing our baby, let’s ask ourselves who is serving whose needs. And if it is not the community’s needs, just recall the elected representative, immediately!

     

  • OpenSpace Agility, On Demand Workshop, London

    OpenSpace Agility™ with Daniel Mezick
    Workshop: On Demand, London+, U.K.

    Fragment of OpenSpace Agiligy (TM) graphic by Daniel Mezick
    Graphic (c) 2015 www.OpenSpaceAgility.com. . . . . All rights reserved; provided by permission of OSA.

    Co-creating Transformation At Scale

    Booking information below

    Struggling to get buy-in? Brilliant implementation plan getting stuck in reality?

    Daniel Mezick 1Caterfly is excited to be teaming up with Daniel Mezick, whose OpenSpace Agility™ method is the foundation of Caterfly’s model for introducing organisational change. Daniel has developed a new approach to creating an adaptive and customisable, collaborative culture shift at scale; for example introducing Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum or new ways of working, becoming more ‘responsive’, ‘teal’ or self-organising, implementing sustainability programs and more.

    Daniel is a well-known Agile coach, culture hacker, speaker, author of The Culture Game, and co-author of The OpenSpace Agility Handbook.

    In this workshop you learn
    • How you can create a culture of enthusiasm, agility and effectiveness in your organisation
    • How you can prevent resistance to change
    • Why on average 70% of change programs ultimately fail
    • What actually works, and how you can transform your workplace with proven tools that get the job done
    • How to save money by reducing coach / coaching days to get solid results and continuous improvement.
    • Why the power of invitation, co-creation and self-organisation avoids cultural inertia and change fatigue
    • How to harness latent ingenuity and collective-intelligence
    • How to invite the whole organisation to collaborative action using Open Space Technology
    • How to integrate and consolidate what’s already working well

    Handbook Cover

    Each student receives
    • A proven and repeatable method for rescuing faltering change initiatives
    • A very rich learning experience with colleagues from diverse backgrounds working in a highly interactive self-organising peer-learning environment
    • The OpenSpace Agility™ certificate of completion
    • Listing in the OpenSpace Agility-certified consultants list, on the OSA web site.
    • Membership of the private online group of certificate holders, for continued peer-development
    • A free copy of Daniel’s OpenSpace Agility Handbook
    Who Should Attend

    Leaders, managers, facilitators, consultants, coaches and anyone involved in process and culture change in organisations. Although the process has so far been used most for the adoption of Agile working, it is a tool for a broad and diverse range of contexts. Professionals familiar with Open Space Technology and tools for self-organisation will be interested to learn of new applications in the workplace.

    Full details of workshop content.  Further reading and booking, see below.

    How OpenSpace Agility™ works

    In these times of rapid change and complexity, the triple-win of organisational culture is engagement, agility and effectiveness. Our framework will help you get there, together: a radically different approach to leading change, which is confoundingly simple and practical. The whole team or organisation is invited to co-creative change together, in a way that is more effective, manageable and genuinely long lasting, while reducing stress and change fatigue.

    Daniel Mezick OpenSpace Agility Agile conferenceIn place of change initiatives that rely on a disenfranchising mandate from above and a rigid, pre-planned roll-out, OpenSpace Agility™ approach integrates the power of invitation, leadership storytelling, iteration, self-organisation and game mechanics to achieve rapid, lasting and effective change across an organisation.

    There is growing awareness that the reason many change programmes fail or do not work as expected is not because of the often quoted poor communications and people’s ‘resistance to change’, but because the people affected by the change are not asked, never mind invited to contribute to the change. Culture shifts and new ways of working cannot simply be imposed. What is needed is to invite all affected to co-create and customise change together, in a manageable and iterative way.

    OpenSpace Agility works for one simple reason: it generates extremely  high levels of engagement across your organisation.  This engagement is essential to the success of your program, and no other method does this better than OpenSpace Agility.
    Daniel Mezick

    But how do you do that at scale? Surely this involves thousands of conversations and story rewriting across the organisation or department? Surely it’s an impossible and expensive task to get all the networks and collaborations connected without hampering the main operation of the organisation? Yet there is a way, using the principle of self-organisation in large scale gatherings, which not only achieves all these necessary cross-connections, but also produces positive synchronicity and serendipity, efficiently and with results that are staff-led.

    OpenSpace Agility is a clearly structured, repeatable framework for introducing, reinvigorating and consolidating agility, lean and other collaborative forms of working in organisations.  Daniel Mezick has created this framework incorporating ‘Open Space‘ events to invite all affected to drive collaborative transformation based on staff expertise:

    a more human, engaging and participatory approach to leading change.

    About the Main Instructor:

    DANIEL MEZICK: OSA CERTIFIED TRAINER

    Daniel MezickDANIEL MEZICK is an author, executive and Agile coach, and  keynote speaker. He is the formulator of OpenSpace Agility.

    He is the author of THE CULTURE GAME, a book describing sixteen patterns of group behavior that help make any team smarter. The book is based on five years of experience coaching 119 Agile teams across 25 different organizations.

    Daniel’s client list includes CapitalOne, INTUIT, THE HARTFORD, CIGNA, SIEMENS Healthcare, Harvard University, and many smaller enterprises. Daniel is based in Guilford, Connecticut, USA.  Learn more and contact Daniel at www.DanielMezick.com.

    Supported by UK facilitators Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel  – See the About US page.

     

    Find out more

    Full details of workshop content – This is an experiential workshop which is structured to demonstrate the principles of the approach it teaches, including using some Open Space Technology for participant-led learning and practice, adapted to your needs.

    The OpenSpace Agility process At a Glance.

    Caterfly Article: Invite staff to co-create change / OpenSpace Agility Handbook review

    Caterfly Article: Why Coercion Doesn’t Work

    Caterfly Article: The Problem With Change Management

    Caterfly Article: What is Open Space?

    Daniel Mezick’s website, blog and further details

    OpenSpace Agility testimonials

     

    Prices and booking

    • Standard: £790
    • Early Bird until 15 August 16: £590
    • Individuals / not-for-profit: £690
      Note: VAT is not applicable

    Fees include all course materials and the book. They also include coffee breaks and lunch on both days, but does not include transportation, accommodation or dinner.

    No charges for bank transfer payments upon invoice
    Invoice sent by email following booking, with charges removed. Reservation held for 1 week, booking completed upon payment by bank transfer (or cheque).

    Payment by card now
    We regret that payment processing charges will be added.

    In the unlikely event of any cancellation or if you need to cancel, full refunds will be made immediately until 2 weeks before, after which if you need to cancel then we will refund 50%.

    This event is brought to you by Caterfly, a collaboration between Thriving Planet CIC and Transcultural Synergy Ltd

    If you have (or can gather) a group of at least ten people who would like to take this course in London, or anywhere in the U.K., either in-house or as a public event, then please contact us to explore further.

     Team: Daniel Mezick, head instructor, founder of OpenSpace Agility and Prime/OS,

    with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel, hosting team.

    Contact: events@caterfly.co.uk or call 020 7117 8648

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  • Book Review: The Open Space Agility Handbook

    Book Review: The Open Space Agility Handbook

    Handbook Cover
    Book Cover

    This is a brilliant how-to book. It addresses the problem of resistance and poor engagement in agile adoptions and organisational change. Why is it, for instance, that the majority of agile adoptions, despite huge investments, fail? The approach presented resolves root causes and offers a completely fresh and novel way of implementing agile. And while this new book focuses on ‘agile’, it applies equally to organisational transformation overall.

    The title, The Open Space Agility Handbook, sounds pretty inconspicuous and unobtrusive. And in one sense that’s all it is, as the title says it’s a handbook on how to adopt agile practices, using an Open Space Technology framework; a step by step how to guide on implementing agile. What the book’s title does not betray, however, is the transformative power of its approach. It represents a revolutionary approach to large scale agile adoptions, and beyond; it tackles head on one of the key challenges of organisational interventions and change management itself. As innocuous as the book may seem, don’t be fooled by its simplicity. It describes an elegant solution to one of the most difficult challenges of management, that of scaled organisational change. What’s more, it is completely fit for purpose in the age of distributed leadership, it follows the principles of opt-in and it walks the talk of self-organisation.

    On the surface the book is for agile coaches, trainers and leaders wanting to implement agile into their organisations, using a scalable process of invitation and co-creation, rather than dilapidating mandation and imposition. The book describes in immaculate detail, yet in very clear easy to understand language, how this can be done. The book is supported by beautiful diagrams step by step in a highly practical way, with very easy to follow hands-on instructions. The diagrams all form part of a larger diagram representing the overall road map. As a guide it is beautifully presented.

    On a deeper level it is far more than a handbook. While the book illustrates the how, it represents a fresh way of adopting agile. Although concentrating on agile only, the principles and philosophy behind it have ramifications beyond agile, and the book should appeal to a wider corporate audience, in fact to anyone seeking to introduce system change in an organisation. The approach could just as easily apply to the adoption of lean, teal, peer-to-peer learning, distributed leadership, conscious business, environmental sustainability, beyond budgeting, reinventing organisations or indeed any other form of organisational transformation.

    But why do we need a different approach to agile, lean, teal etc adoptions, or to change management? Simply put, because the majority of agile adoptions, lean implementations or change management interventions don’t work (the statistics vary from 60% – 80% failure rates depending on how one defines failure, anything from simply not achieving expected results to catastrophic breakdown). One reason is that these interventions are mandated or imposed, without consulting those doing the work. This leads to unintended consequences of resistance at best, silent internal sabotage at worst.

    In the case of agile those doing the work are software engineers, people who are both   very intelligent as well as often introvert in nature: they resist imposed change, but do not articulate their views. Instead they either simply ignore directives (‘internal sabotage’) or walk away completely (and they can afford to).   Corrective notions of “improving communications” and “achieving better buy-in” completely miss the point. What is needed is to invite the relevant work-force to co-create the change together, as a collaborative iterative effort, with everyone’s perspective valued.

    How can one invite a whole department or even a whole large company to co-create change at scale? Through a process of self-organisation in a framed structure of iterations and experimentations, which fully engage the relevant workforce constructively in the process. This is achieved by applying the principles of Open Space Technology at the beginning and the end of the timed iterations. Open Space Technology is a self-organising large scale counter-intuitive meeting of minds format which has been tried and tested over the last 30 years in over 150 countries, always with great success. However, if you want to know the details of how it all works and how to do adaptions and transformations, read the book!

    _____________________________________________

    This review was originally posted as a review on Amazon on 17 Dec 2015

  • Thurs 29 – Fri 30 October ’15: Deep shift and radical innovation with Open Space

    The art of hosting participant-led unConferences, solving complex problems, accelerating action, leading change in organisations, and hosting conversations that matter.

    An experiential 2 day co-learning workshop: Brighton, with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel

    #OpenSpaceTech

    Book-Now-button-orange-0304-lg

    PageLines- Collectiveintelligencegroupinnovationlightbulb.jpgWhy?
    Do you want a way to rapidly launch new projects, bring participation, engagement, equality and inclusion to your organisation or event? To harness collective ingenuity for problem solving? To lead transformation that is real and lasting? To drive innovation?

    What?
    Learn how to organise and facilitate gatherings using Open Space Technology, a method by which a large group of people can organise themselves into a conference, complete with agenda, break-out sessions, action planning and reports, with almost no preparation before-hand. Open Space allows each participant to do what they came to do, and can be a very effective way of launching large-scale change or responding to a looming crisis.
    Book-Now-button-orange-0304-lg Who?
    This workshop invites those who are new to using Open Space and those who already have some or even extensive experience of using it, to co-learn together, deepen our practice, and share our experiences of using it. In this 2 day workshop we will have the opportunity to experience Open Space as attendees commonly do, with space to reflect and to go deeper into designing an event as part of a broader programme.

    How?
    This workshop will be run as an Open Space so that participants can learn experientially, while learning how to design, prepare and facilitate an Open Space event, including tips and tricks, likely issues that may be encountered, follow up and incorporating an event within a wider context or strategy.

    What is Open Space?
    Open Space Technology is a format for organising compostable conferences, unconferences, meetings, stakeholder engagement, BarCamps and CityCamps, with maximum efficiency and minimum time and resources. It is a form of ‘crowd sourcing’ which can be used to bring together a company or any group or organisation to focus on a specific problem or question. Open Space allows for participants to co-create experience, learning and solutions in a way that unlocks creativity.

    Open Space is used by large companies, local government, community activists, and forward thinking organisations everywhere, from gatherings of 5 to several thousand people, from a couple of hours to several days.Book-Now-button-orange-0304-lg

    Please contact us if you would like to hire us as facilitators, consultants or trainers. Martin and Francois also use the Open Smart Transformation model at Caterfly to bring about deep and lasting transformation or problem solving in organisations with Open Space.

    Find out more about Open Space here – What is Open Space?

    More workshops and events:
    See Martin’s site for coming Sociocracy and Mindfulness workshops: http://2bwow.org.uk/workshops/
    November (tbc): Shift2 – an unConference. Following the success of Shift, we’re hosting another.

    Please click on subscribe for low volume updates and new articles, and click on events for schedule.

    Red_Butterfly_86x80Workshop hosted by There’s Better Ways Of Working, a trading name of Thriving Planet CIC, in partnership with Caterfly.

  • Thurs 20 – Fri 21 August ’15: Deep shift and radical innovation with Open Space

    The art of hosting participant-led unConferences, solving complex problems, accelerating action, leading change in organisations, and hosting conversations that matter.

    An experiential 2 day co-learning workshop: Brighton, with Martin Grimshaw and Francois Knuchel

    * We regret that this date has been postponed – we are currently arranging a new date in October ’15 – please contact us to request a preference and early bird discount *

     A very limited number of ‘pay-what-you-want’ tickets are available on application. You just need to tell us a dazzling (but short) story of why you think the world will be a better place for you being on the course.

    Also: Fri 12 June 1 day, London, Unleash The People With Open Space
    Tue 21 July, unConference: Shift – Why aren’t organisations shifting?

    Eventbrite - Deep shift and radical innovation with Open Space

     #OpenSpaceTech

    Why?

    PageLines- Collectiveintelligencegroupinnovationlightbulb.jpgDo you want a way to rapidly launch new projects, bring participation, engagement, equality and inclusion to your organisation or event? To harness collective ingenuity for problem solving? To lead transformation that is real and lasting? To drive innovation?

    What?
    Learn how to organise and facilitate gatherings using Open Space Technology, a method by which a large group of people can organise themselves into a conference, complete with agenda, break-out sessions, action planning and reports, with almost no preparation before-hand. Open Space allows each participant to do what they came to do, and can be a very effective way of launching large-scale change or responding to a looming crisis.

    Eventbrite - Deep shift and radical innovation with Open Space
    Who?

    This workshop invites those who are new to using Open Space and those who already have some or even extensive experience of using it, to co-learn together, deepen our practice, and share our experiences of using it. In this 2 day workshop we will have the opportunity to experience Open Space as attendees commonly do, with space to reflect and to go deeper into designing an event as part of a broader programme.

    How?
    This workshop will be run as an Open Space so that participants can learn experientially, while learning how to design, prepare and facilitate an Open Space event, including tips and tricks, likely issues that may be encountered, follow up and incorporating an event within a wider context or strategy.

     

    What is Open Space?
    Open Space Technology is a format for organising compostable conferences, unconferences, meetings, stakeholder engagement, BarCamps and CityCamps, with maximum efficiency and minimum time and resources. It is a form of ‘crowd sourcing’ which can be used to bring together a company or any group or organisation to focus on a specific problem or question. Open Space allows for participants to co-create experience, learning and solutions in a way that unlocks creativity.

    Open Space is used by large companies, local government, community activists, and forward thinking organisations everywhere, from gatherings of 5 to several thousand people, from a couple of hours to several days.

    Eventbrite - Deep shift and radical innovation with Open Space

    Please contact us if you would like to hire us as facilitators, consultants or trainers.

    Caterfly Logo slogan urlMartin and Francois also use the Open Smart Transformation model at Caterfly to bring about deep and lasting transformation or problem solving in organisations with Open Space.

    Find out more about Open Space here – What is Open Space?

    Please click on subscribe for low volume training and new articles, and click on events for schedule.

  • Do change mandates work?

    Do change mandates work?

    Do Organisational Change Mandates Work?

     

    It has been my contention for a long time that one of the reasons change mandates experience a 60%-80% failure rate (depending on definition, metrics etc) is not because there is anything wrong with the new system or working practice an organisation is implementing, nor because of poor communication or persuasion skills of the executives or consultants charged with the intervention, but rather very simply because the employees affected are often not asked nor consulted in the matter. They are simply informed of the changes as a fait accompli, they are not invited to co-create the future of the organisation. This in turns leads to disengagement, disenchantment or even cynicism, which can create a block in the change being implemented.

    Resistance to Change?

    This block is often expressed as “resistance” to change, and most change management programs are often about “managing” this alleged “resistance”.  Actually, however, in most cases it is not change itself people are resisting, but rather the imposition of a system or practice in which they had no involvement in creating, and is thus alien. Margaret Wheatley put it this way:

    [People don’t] … accept imposed solutions, pre-determined designs, or well-articulated plans that have been generated somewhere else.  Too often, we interpret their refusal as resistance.  We say that people innately resist change.  But the resistance we experience from others is not to change itself. It is to the particular process of change that believes in imposition rather than creation.  It is the resistance of a living system to being treated as a non-living thing.”

    Or as Peter Senge says: “People don’t resist change, they resist being changed.”

    In other words the problem with change and the alleged resistance to change is not change itself, but rather the imposition or mandation of change from above. Japanese organisations have no problem with change, it is part of their culture. This is outwardly reflected in the agility of their buildings to adapt to changing environmental circumstances (typhoons, earthquakes), in traditional shrines being ‘rebuilt’ periodically, and in the fluidity between inner and outer space. In my experience Japanese organisations are continuously re-organising themselves according to changing circumstances, and this is done by all employees, down to the shop-floor, who are taught how to solve problems and how to adapt nimbly. Management consultancies hardly exist in Japan (yes, the McKinseys have plush show offices in Tokyo, but their clients are largely expatriate companies) – you do not need expensive change consultants when you can self-organise and change yourself.  Change in Japan is not something thought out at the top, but rather everyone in the organisation is engaged in co-creating the changes.

    The problem with Western organisational change, as I see it, is having too rigid organisational structures in the first place (inflexibility by design), imposing change from above without asking those doing the work first, and not giving the workforce the tools and authority to solve their own problems, and hence to co-create change when and as it is required.

    The Zappos Case

    Recently Zappos, the unique online shoe retailer based in Nevada, has been in the news about a memo from its CEO, Tony Hsieh, to its employees in which he offers all of them severance pay if they wish to leave the company because they are not comfortable in its new management environment. In the last 18 months the 1,500 strong company has been embarking on a massive change program, converting from a ‘command and control’ management structure, to one without formal managers, giving all employees equivalent decision-making powers to elect people to specific needs-based tasks or roles in a self-managed manner. The approach is known as ‘holacracy’, a derivative of the Dutch Quaker creation ‘sociocracy’ (find out more here). This full scale adoption of holacracy is the largest of its kind to date, hence many are following the story with keen interest.

    The implementation requires a “roll-out” of a substantial amount of training (running meetings, consent decision-making, circle formations), and the program is now running to a first completion stage. It is clear that it has faced certain difficulties, both successes as well departures by disenchanted staff. Here are a few links to recent reports:

    The Zappos story is actually a more interesting case, in my view, than most change programs: in a manner of speaking management here is mandating to abolish itself.  The self-organising aspect of holacracy is, in my view, somewhat similar to Japanese management styles. True Japanese firms have managers in a hierarchy, but managers are more like mentors who attribute authority to solutions their staff have come up with and consented to.  Moreover the fundamental information flow is horizontal working towards satisfying customers, rather than vertically serving shareholders.  Prof Kichiro Hayashi (Tokyo Aoyama University) has referred to Japanese (and Oriental in general) management as organic.  This organic style is very flexible and agile at adapting to changing circumstances, yet rather inefficient and seemingly disorganised in a static world; whereas Western ‘mechanical’ management is super-efficient in a stable world, but lacks the capacity to self-organise and self-change.

    Ordering no more Orders

    The Zappos story is thus to me an interesting Western attempt to address this, and in light of the perceived need to transform our capitalism it is being observed by many with keen interest.  You might expect employees to embrace the opportunity to take on more responsibility, without having to be accountable to the eccentricities of a boss. Many do. But as Erich Fromm has shown, many also fear freedom. For some, in a world where they have been used to receiving orders, operating without them is scary and may create in them profound disorientation.

    Nevertheless with support and coaching most people could easily get used to the new approach, though the bigger the organisation the more difficult it is to do. At the same time, however, there is a felt contradiction in the CEO being required to order that there would be no orders from hence on. To be fair to holacracy, its website says this about this apparent paradox of the CEO needing power to adopt holacracy: “Holacracy is a fundamental shift of authority: it changes the seat of power from the CEO to the Holacracy Constitution, which then distributes that power through specific processes. You cannot shift the seat of power without the CEO’s approval (and shouldn’t be able to). …, you need a formal agreement from that CEO to vest her/his power into something else — in this case the Holacracy Constitution. Without this formal agreement, you would just be “pretending” to work differently”

    So what is it, then, that is causing the CEO to posit such an ultimatum “self-organize or leave the company”? Why is this change program evoking such drastic measures? True, the severance package is very generous, yet the dictum feels a little like a dictator forcing subjects to participate, initiate (with their own views) and be engaged. I cannot speak for holacracy, but that would defeat the purpose of its parent methodology, sociocracy, which envisions “people working together as different, unique persons on the basis of mutual equivalence in decision-making” – yet seemingly no differences are allowed at Zappos.  This contravenes the desirability for diversity in order to create richness in decision-making. Unintentionally I suspect, it does look like Zappos want clones of each other. Yet can you really offer severance packages to family members?

    So why resistance?

    So why is there resistance, what is it some staff are riling against? The issue I believe is that holacracy was mandated or imposed. Staff were never asked or consulted whether they wanted holacracy, nor were they invited to co-develop the holacracy transformation. It was simply imposed on them. Somewhat paradoxically, but imposed nevertheless. What people are really rejecting is not holacracy itself, but being forced to change without consultation. This comes back to what I said initially, it is not the system or new behaviour that people are resisting, but the way it is being mandated and imposed. Holacracy may be a great idea, but mandating it doesn’t work. In the case of Zappos, this was already predicted a year ago in March 2014 in the blog “The Mandate of Holacracy at Zappos” by Daniel Mezick, author of Culture Games and agile coach, who was investigating why it was that 80% of agile adoptions were considered unsuccessful.

    In short it is mandation which is the problem, not holacracy nor resistance to change in general. This is what we at Caterfly are trying to address with the Open Smart Transformation model, involving a special framework of two Open Space Technology events, where all affected personnel are invited to hold deep dialogues about the change. The two events also demark a period of 3 – 6 months, a cocoon of iterations, in which all employees are trained and coached in the new approach, are asked to suspend judgement and instead apply the new way on a trial and error basis, learning and prototyping, enabling all affected to be involved and engaged in the transformation process. This open ended playful period ends with a second Open Space event where everyone can work on sorting out what worked, what needs adapting and what to reject. In other words the new approach thereby becomes customised to the particular organisation, rather than being something off the shelf, and this work is all done collaboratively by the staff.  Consequently they own the change, it is no longer an alien system, they all co-created the transformation together.

    This process was initially developed and applied with great success fo agile adoptions where typically 70 – 80% failed. We realised that the fundamental principles of the new approach are true beyond just agile. They apply to adopting lean, responsive, management 3.0, conscious capitalism, environmental management, and holacracy/sociocracy too, and indeed of any new systems implementation or organisational transformation / change management. While what Tony Hsieh is trying to do is not only extremely noble and brave, and is being done with a great deal of generosity and candidness, it is a great pity it had been mandated initially. I am sure he could have avoided this “accept holacracy or get out” dilemma, if Zappos had invited the staff to co-create the change rather than imposing it on them. However generous the severance package offer may be, it now puts Tony Hsieh in a difficult position – some staff may see him, in trepidation, as the ultimate arbiter of who is to stay and who is to go.

    Change Platform

    In short, mandation or imposition does not work well! This is also summarised in Gary Hammel’s McKinsey article late 2014 “Build a Change Platform, not a Change Program”. Caterfly’s iterative cocoon-forming double open-space framework and follow up is such a platform, we believe, or at the very least helps establish one. Fundamentally we need to change change itself from a mandation mind-set to one of invitation: inviting all affected persons to co-create the new order of things, and thereby co-own it.  Open Space Technology, doubled to form an iterative cocoon platform, is the only offline synchronous platform I am aware of that enables this to scale with large numbers of people, effectively, rapidly and sustainably.


    Come join us at Shift: Why Aren’t Organisations Shifting? 21 July 2015, London
    Details www.caterfly.co.uk/events

    Further reading:
    Why telling people what to do doesn’t work – click
    The problem with change management – click

     

     

  • Massive collaborative self-organised learning experience

    Experience: Massive Collaborative Self-organised Learning with Theory U

    From Ego to Eco: Transforming Business, Society, and Self

    Recently I was among 15,000+ ‘change makers’ from 180 countries who participated in a large MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) learning experiment initiated by MIT’s (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Professor Otto Scharmer, author of ‘Theory U‘ and ‘Leading from the Emergent Future, From Ego-System to Eco-System Economics‘.

    The course is heralding a new style of education, which I would call ‘the internet of learning‘, and which happens to also align well with our approach here at Caterfly. As it turns out, though not by design, the education style applies many of the principles of SOLE (Self Organised Learning Environments – that I have previously written about here) and Open Space Technology (which is a pillar of our work at Caterfly and our Open Smart Transformation model) to achieve something that so far has largely been lacking in most MOOCs: interactivity, intensive group work and peer learning.

    Here is the course description for U.Lab: Transforming Business, Society, and Self:

    Learn how to create profound innovation in a time of disruptive change by leading from the emerging future. This highly experiential course is based on Theory U, a framework, method, and way of connecting to the more authentic aspects of our self. It introduces the variable of consciousness into management and the social sciences, and proposes that the quality of the results that we create in any kind of social system is a function of the quality of awareness, attention or consciousness that the participants in the system operate from.

    The course has operated as an experience on three levels:

    1) Why isn’t fundamental change happening?
    It addressed the issues of societal and business change and transformation currently in the Zeitgeist, exploring why it is that there is a sense of great changes in the air, yet in practice actually very little is changing. It explored the deeper source levels of disconnects, which could lead to catastrophic outcomes if not dealt with, and how these could be resolved in a more collaborative and harmonious manner. The fundamental premise is that all transformation has to start with the self.

    2) Going round the curve: Theory U and mindful emergence
    The course examined the U-Theory process itself. Theory U, as espoused by Otto Scharmer and colleagues, is a process of many steps that allows one and teams to build towards emerging futures through listening to deeper levels of inner wisdom and through co-sensing a new future trying to be born, while co-creating prototypes adaptable and responsive to the future that emerges. At first the 25 or so steps to achieve this appeared to me to be highly convoluted; however, this is why I joined the course, to learn more about this famous U-process without prejudice, and I must admit what I found was quite enlightening and encouraging (many of the steps are actually just refinements of five main processes), if only listening to one’s and others’ hearts with open mind and will.

    3) Collaborative, self-organised, peer-learning
    The third level was the learning process itself, the SOLE+Open Space-like aspect already alluded to above. The structure followed a similar MOOCs type of sequence commonly found in EdX, Coursera and Udacity courses, with video presentations, readings, assignments and a forum where one could engage in written posts, comments, questions etc, all in itself an interesting way of presenting new academic material. At the same time, however, the ULAB course had a unique interactive component which was developed at the authors’ own website at the Presencing Institute. This allowed the 15,000 participants (or at least those actively following the course) to form into local hubs which would meet, either in person or online, to discuss certain aspects of the course, and moreover to form ‘Coaching Circles’ about which I’ll talk more further on.

    There were also three live presentations of 1.5 hours each with the whole ULAB team present and many of the 15,000 participants doing some journalling and deep listening exercises together at the same time. In many cases the hubs met in different cities around the world to view the live presentations together and to discuss the content afterwards, although because people were operating on different 24 hour time zones in many cases the hubs met at other times. There was also a real commitment and energy from the Ulab team. This was demonstrated in the second live broadcast which happened to be exactly on the day when Boston (where MIT is based) experienced one of the worst snow storms it has ever experienced, with all transportation and schools being closed; the team had to get special permission to stay overnight in the closed university to be able to run the live global broadcast the following morning.

    The hubs and coaching circles were completely self-organised (with the assistance of the Presencing Institute website platform which enabled this) in terms of who joined which hub or circle, when and where they met, how they communicated and what they did. The Ulab team had provided some guidelines as to how the hubs might form and facilitate their meetings, but it was essentially completely self-initiated and self-organised.

    I actually took part in several hubs, one for London which met several times, one for the UK which also met centrally in Leamington Spa, one for Europe, which was more informal, and I was also part of an international hub, which we called the Cloud Hub, which met online only. This Cloud Hub was the most active (of the four), had about 30 participants, from India, Finland, Holland, Spain, UK, Canada, USA, Brasil, Chile and Argentina. We communicated by email, WhatsApp chat, Skype, Google Hangouts, Facebook (we created a Facebook page) and Google Drive for sharing documents, and the Presencing Institute site itself has some communication tools which were useful for sharing things with the whole ULab community.

    The ULab team had set an appropriate online environment and conditions for the hubs and coaching circles to form by themselves, and most of the learning happened from peer learning. The deepest learning occurred in the coaching circles. The coaching circles consisted of maximum 5 people who met weekly for 90 minutes, to go through one of our member’s ‘case’. This was a highly structured process which was self-managed using an instruction sheet and a time-keeper. Unlike traditional coaching, the emphasis in these peer-coaching exercises was on supporting the case-giver by holding back from reactions and advice, instead allowing deeper levels of understanding, empathy and wisdom to emerge for collective learning. The exercise engendered a deep form of listening and conversing, both individually and collectively, which enabled far richer conversations to occur than is normally the case. The coaching circles formed some deep conversations which I have otherwise only come across naturally in Open Space events.

    Other group tasks included paying attention to the different levels of listening we operate at, journalling, empathy walks, collective mindfulness and later prototyping. The latter is really about going beyond the deep listening and collective wisdom towards co-creating or birthing a new world, by a process of trial and error or build, test out and reform. This process allows the collective to be responsive to changing circumstances. This is a very different type of transformation approach from the planned (based on the past) and enforced or rolled out change interventions usually applied by change makers, and which often cascade top-down through hierarchies. In the past the typical mode has been about making change (following a pre-planned blueprint), often without asking (with the ensuing natural resistance), rather than letting change happen (with a vision of the desired future) and constantly adapting this to the actually emergent future through a prototyping mind-set.

    The key learnings I got from this course are: It demonstrated a prototype of a new kind of learning using online digital tools, which relies on and works on the principle of online SOLE – Self-Organised Learning Environments, with a particular focus on peer learning. Fundamentally the same principles are at work as in Open Space meetings – and indeed one of the key words Professor Otto Scharmer kept on referring to was, as change-makers, to “hold the space” to allow the deeper conversations to happen, without which any real organisational transformation is not possible – just as you cannot force people and organisations to learn, so you cannot coerce them to change!

    I am not sure how easy it would be to scale the U-lab approach to whole organisations (businesses, government agencies, educational institutions) who are undergoing a transformation, but the one thing I am even more convinced of now is that it is absolutely paramount that the employees and affected personnel in any transformation must be involved in very deep conversations about the desired change at its initiation, in order to co-sense it and co-create it. Change is absolutely not something that can be imposed or mandated up or down as has traditionally been practiced in the past. Indeed change management itself needs to change. And the key to these deep conversations is enabling an environment, holding the space, so people can listen empathetically, mindfully and constructively to each other to co-create the change. The Open Space event format enables this space to be held, and is thus the easiest and most efficient way to invite large numbers of people into the process in the same space simultaneously, so that they can create the transformation together.

    Further information

    Theory U: Wikipedia, Otto Scharmer’s publications

    Presencing Institute

    From Ego to Eco:
    – Future Considerations book review
    – Otto Scharmer presentation at Wisdom 2.0 Business conference

    List of available free MOOC courses at MOOC List

    SOLE – Self-Organised Learning Environments

    What is Open Space Technology?

  • SOLE – self organising learning environments

    SOLE – self organising learning environments

    Self Organising Learning Environments… and what it means for the future workplace

    Anyone who has come across TED prize winner Sugata Mitra’s Hole In The Wall computer experiment in India (see videos below) will realise that organisational management is not the only human activity facing a crisis nowadays, but so is education and schooling in its traditional forms. Both management and teaching suffer from the innate habit of its professionals wanting to micro-manage everything, wanting to command and control, indeed trying to control outcomes, rather than letting them emerge. Sugata Mitra calls for creating Self-Organising Learning Environments (SOLE), and his experiments have shown some surprising results.

    In SOLE “teachers” should not supply answers, but raise questions instead. It is not about making learning happen, but letting it happen. Too often the urge is for us to interfere. As Eton former headmaster Tony Little has said, not enough attention is paid to learning from peers; contending that what makes a school great is not good teachers, but creating an environment where learning can happen among peers. Peer learning is so much more powerful than is assumed, as the hole in wall experiments have shown; the problem is that this is also worrysome for managers and teachers alike: in SOLE they cannot control it, the learning happens by itself. Managers and teachers alike find it hard to let go.

    A similar self-organising principle takes place in Open Space Technology (commonly Open Space) meetings. Open Space is all about letting conversations happen, rather the making them happen through a controlled or moderated program. There is a marketplace of ideas, people group and regroup in a completely self-organised way and move around freely, thus maximising peer learning, peer problem-solving or peer co-creativity. Open Space merely sets the environment or the right conditions for deep passionate conversations to happen. Those who try to “improve” this seemingly unmanaged process, actually interfere and disrupt the natural self-organising, and all too often poor micro-management and controlling patterns set back in. The biggest challenge in SOLE, Open Space or other self-organising systems is preventing managers, teachers or moderators from interfering – getting them to just let go.

    “You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him discover it within himself.” Galileo Galilei

    That self-organised peer learning works I can attest through personal experience. In the 1980’s I was working as language project manager / director of studies at Suzuki Motors HQ in Japan for the massive ‘technology transfer’ project, transferring Suzuki’s manufacturing and management skills (what was later termed Lean Manufacturing, Lean Management, or Lean by others) from its plants to partner Canadian company, CAMI Automotive in Ontario. The essence of Lean is that it is not just about the system employed, but just as importantly about the high level of responsibility delegated and trust accorded to those actually doing the work, the ‘workers’ on the shop floor. Our task was to train over 200 shop-floor team leaders in basic English communication skills and training skills, so that they could train 2,000 Canadian workers in those Lean skills (at that time practically no-one in the West knew what Lean was or how it worked). Toyota were also undertaking similar joint-venture projects at the time (e.g. Nummi, Derby) but took a different approach, sending hundreds of their managers across as expatriates to manage the plants. Suzuki did not have the resources to do that, moreover it had undertaken to operate the CAMI plant as a collaborative venture with the Canadian Automotive Union employing local managers right from the start of production, so it was paramount that the transition and training run smoothly.

    The problem was that the Japanese team leaders were highly skilled in the work, but had absolutely no foreign language skills (indeed they had never been abroad) and had essentially been school drop outs, with a clear distaste for formal schooling. The idea that they, at 40 or 50 years old, should suddenly go ‘back to school’ to learn a new language was utterly repulsive to them, and many had threatened to leave the company – they had already ‘given up’ before even starting.  It was clear that any more conventional form of language and cross-cultural training program was out of the question.  That is precisely why we, our company, were brought in at the time, as we had already had plenty of experience successfully running training programs for ‘blue-collar’ workers, particularly at Kobelco.

    “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery

    Our approach was unconventional. Instead of spoon-feeding elements piece by piece, we created a total physical context or environment and relied completely on the power of self-organised peer learning, using approaches like ‘Total Physical Response’, ‘Suggestopedia’ and ‘Structuro Global Audio Visual’ learning. These are all holistic and context driven in nature (which is how babies learn!), much like the computer in the wall. Without going into detail here, it was not what the team leaders had feared, and not only did they have great fun with the approach, they learned so much and quickly from the peer activities, that their attitudes and enthusiasm changed completely, to everyone’s delight.

    The second half of the 6 months program was devoted to developing the supervisors’ technical training skills, in English. Most conventional technical English courses would start by teaching an array of technical expressions and role-playing simulated situations step by step. We did none of that! Our program, called SPEC and developed by David Vale, consisted of an empty room, with walls prepared so that notices, posters, kanban etc could be stuck on them, a corner with a rich resource of source material (technical books, magazines etc, nowadays we would put computers, but they weren’t around in those days and neither was the internet!), and a marketplace of projects. Their job was to prepare their workplace training material in English and practice teaching it (practicing with each other). The only thing we gave them were a few guidelines and framework expressions for doing a presentation or running a training session (they had already learned training meta-language from previous TPR). They had 8 weeks with 4 hours each day together in the same room to get ready.

    Jigsaw puzzle handsEach day we started in a circle (everything we did always started and finished in a circle), and they would start by deciding what areas they each wanted to work on, and posted their information on the marketplace board. They then naturally grouped together according to their needs, they moved around to other groups as they needed to, and they prepared, organised and practiced with and from each other. We instructors did not interfere at all in this self-organising process, nor in the material they were actually working on. It was all entirely driven by them and our only role was as a resource person, answering questions and giving specific cultural feedback when it was requested. It worked beautifully. At the end they achieved their mission. I cannot emphasise enough how powerful self-organised peer learning can be, if the learning is allowed to emerge, rather than coerced (most teaching or training is trainer-led ‘push’ imposition rather than ‘pull’ emergence).

    At the time I had not heard of Open Space Technology (there was no internet), but when I later discovered Open Space I immediately recognized that it was exactly what we had been doing, but instead of in a meeting or conference context, ours was in a classroom learning setting. Instead of 2-3 full days of Open Space, it was 40 half days of SPEC, but fundamentally following the same self-organising peer-driven process. It is also the same self-organising peer-learning principle which plays in SOLE. The biggest challenge for me as the manager at the Suzuki project at the time had not been the initially very reticent learners – once they realised that self-organised peer learning could be fun and rewarding they were absolutely fine. Ironically the biggest challenge was some of the instructors on our own team – we had had to hire highly qualified instructors for image reasons (the clients wanted good bios and qualifications), yet I then had to ‘unteach’ them almost everything they had learned to do as instructors. Some took it up quickly, but others found it very hard indeed to let go and let be.

    I should add the project was highly successful. The subsequent training of the Canadians was so effective that most of the Japanese supervisors were able to return to Japan after just one year instead of the planned two years – the cost savings to Suzuki was enormous compared to the initial training costs. This new ‘bilingual’ team of trainers were then available for new assignments – they were subsequently sent on 2-3 year stints to Hungary, India, Malaysia, Thailand and eventually China, from which we see some of the huge changes from shabby box vehicles to modern cars in the new Skodas, Tatas and Protons. I would like to think that our Open Space / SOLE type of training contributed to the economic rise of Eastern European and Asian economies as a support mechanism, though l think that would probably be stretching it a little bit too far; after all they were all joint efforts. Equally I’m pretty certain it is fair to say that it would be wrong to assume that Open Space or SOLE had no role to play at all.

    The SOLE principle is also the one we are applying to Caterfly. For a transformation program or implementation of new systems to succeed it is imperative that all affected people are invited in to co-decide, co-learn and co-create the change together. This has to be free of manipulation and needs to be seen to be free of vested interest. The self-organising peer-learning nature of Open Space is ideal to start the leaning process, and let emergence work its wonders. Cocooning the coaching period between beginning and end Open Space events sets protective boundaries within which things can be tried out, played with and people can learn from each other. Caterfly is built on the idea of inviting people into the change process, rather than coercing them, and on the self-organising peer learning that emerges. You cannot control the outcome, the only thing you can do is give it some direction by the questions you ask.

    As the brilliant former Wharton Business School professor Russell Ackoff has said (BBC Interview with Peter Day): “Anyone who’s ever taught a course is aware of the fact that the one who learns the most is the teacher. So schools are upside down. The students ought to be teaching. You cannot teach unless you learn. The faculty ought to be learning, that’s what it knows how to do, it doesn’t know how to teach. The old fashioned Roman school house was a room in which student taught student – the teacher was simply a resource to ask for help, not someone who spoke at them, spurning out knowledge. We need to remake schools to be built around learning, instead of around teaching, and that’s a fundamental revision.”

    And so too it should be with management and leadership, I would say. Let’s apply the Open Space of learning and the SOLE of meetings to new leadership and its transformation!

     

    Sugata Mitra SOLE illustration
    Click to enlarge

    Further reading:

    Why coercion doesn’t work

    What is Open Space?

    Experience: Massive collaborative self-organised learning with Theory U