As a result I decided to interview a few conference planners and also those who are key players on panels from the business community to see what I could do to improve my answer to the question. I talked with Ryan Whisnant, Director of Sustainability for SunGard; Suzanne Fallender, Director, CSR Strategy and Communications, for Intel; and Peter DeBruin and Rachel Riccardella, of State Street Corporation’s corporate responsibility functions—all of whom are presenting next week at Commit Forum.

I posed two questions to each of them based on my intention to find out how people are thinking beyond programmatic aspects of CSR and Sustainability and focusing on how their companies are doing.

1. How are you working to improve your whole industry’s perspective?
2. How are you involving your whole workforce and full co-creator stream in stepping up the level of intention to really make a difference?

SunGard is known for its risk management services around data. They “have your back,” so to speak, when the grid goes down. They also provide software and technology services for financial institutions, local governments, and educational institutions.

Ryan says, he thinks it’s been important to “first get our own house in order before leading by example.”  He feels they are making good progress and still finding innovative ways to improve. They also have strong support from their private equity investors, who increasingly consider sustainability an important factor for creating value in their portfolios and report sustainability performance alongside the financial as part of their disclosure.

Peter and Rachel at State Street echoed the idea of leading by example. They also publish extensive quantitative and qualitative information, beyond transparency on sustainability, with the intention to inspire their readers.  

At Intel there is on-going, active participation as both contributor and learner in forums inside and outside the industry. For example, they are working with advisory panels for two initiates to improve CSR rankings efforts. One project, “Rate the Raters,” seeks to provide an in-depth analysis for rating sustainability efforts by educating agencies who rate and rank business about what they might be looking for in terms of transparency and methodology.

Intel is also actively working on the conflict minerals question because their industry is under the spotlight. They are taking the issue very seriously and are using a white paper to keep alive the creation of questions and solutions. 

All three companies are actively stepping up workforce and co-creator involvement. Intel is working on the idea that you can only embed CSR into the business when the workforce makes it happen. Each functional business group creates their own plan on for engaging their functional business in advancing sustainability. For example, the events marketing team found ways to “green” their Intel Developer Forum conferences, including one in Beijing, China, which resulted in the creation of a Handbook for Smaller Footprint Conferences, which is now available online for use by all Intel groups.

Intel is one of the few companies Suzanne knows of that are seeking to link compensation to their return on CSR objectives (more on this at Commit Forum next week). Intel has also posted a video about the many other approaches they are taking to increase employee involvement.

SunGard seeks to create a culture that integrates sustainability into its business processes.  They are involving leadership to make sustainability part of regular conversations, and they are looking to innovate. Oftentimes industry waits to try an idea until it is certified as “best practice,” which can leave everyone waiting indefinitely and slow down the pace of change. Sustainability efforts can’t afford to wait—and business can’t afford to shut down innovation.

Another important factor that is helping change CSR culture is leadership from Generations X and Y and Millennials, who are speeding up the conversation and making it a more mainstream part of business. “Industry is seeing that those who manage sustainability well tend to manage overall business well,” says Ryan.

At State Street, there is increased enthusiasm for CSR and sustainability arising from wider volunteer involvement in local community projects. Concern for sustainability arises from people in the community and spills back into the business, where the workforce generates more and more innovative ideas.

·  ·  ·

I really enjoyed these short interviews. Many thanks to Ryan, Suzanne, Peter and Rachel for taking the time to talk with me and making me aware that conferences are just larger conversations. Are the people at the conference you’re considering the ones you want to include in the conversation? Are they talking about the questions you think matter? These are now the guiding questions for me when I choose conferences I want to attend.

Commit Forum is next week in New York. It looks like a great conference for learning what some big players are doing and how they are working on questions that matter. But—as always— you’ll need to ask them questions like those in my survey if you really want to hear what’s up at their companies.  You may not agree with their answers, but they will stimulate your thinking and get you outside your day-to-day thinking. That’s got to be a good reason to attend any conference.

If you are considering attending Commit Forum and would like to know more about the people you’ll hear from there, you had better who up. Here is the place to learn more and register.

The Responsible Business has a built-in process whereby teams work on financial effectiveness goals and principles in every initiative and activity. This has the effect of preventing a business from being caught off guard. For example, when Colgate, South Africa sets up teams for specific buyer nodes (e.g. big box or mom-and-pop channels), they report the impact of activities in terms of effects on earnings, margins, and cash flow—Colgate’s and the stores’. In the Responsible Business, this kind of whole-systems understanding that includes all stakeholders, starting with customers, is shared by everyone, from operators on the manufacturing line to chief financial officer.

In addition, in a Responsible Business each and every employee has created their own Personal Development Plan, which includes a “promise beyond ableness.” This is a commitment made by the employee to take on a needed improvement for their buyer node and to calculate and report on its success in terms of improvement in the life of the customer as well as the earnings, margins, and cash flow return to the business. At Colgate, promises beyond ableness were made by each person who sp0nsored a new sales channel, often employees who were not part of the sales team. This was during the period just prior and after the first free elections in South Africa, a time when Colgate’s business was growing while other companies were struggling.

When financial effectiveness and personal development are on-going practice, then there can be very little waste. More importantly, they make it possible to move out of the trap cycles that inevitably occur in all economies and all markets. Business leaders too often forget that they need to build in the flexibility to move up and down smoothly as economic cycles change.

There are many more stories like Colgate’s, with descriptions of how responsibility creates fiscal sustainability, in my new book, The Responsible Business: Reimagining Sustainability and Success.

Premise 1: Self-governing Behavior is Energy Effective

The foundational element in effective human systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self-accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect human behavior from the outside, by others, is wasted energy that could be better used to improve the system and its people. In human systems it is critical to continuously increase self-governing capability.

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

The capability to be self-correcting or self-governing depends on the capability to be self-reflecting. Self-reflection is the observation and interpretation of one’s own internal processes for the purpose of restoring or maintaining homeostasis (internal balance and harmony with one’s environment) and creating heterostasis (evolution and change).

Premise 3:  Developmental Plans Are the Basis for Self-Reflection and Self-Governance

To become self-correcting—individually or as parts of teams—we must operate from development plans that we create for ourselves based on hierarchies of value and influence. Following these plans, we discover ways to express our own uniqueness (first-line work); we learn about ourselves and the joys and problems of working with others (second-line work); we search continuously for opportunities to make contributions to something greater than ourselves (third-line work). We optimize internal balance and maintain the capability to govern ourselves by continuously self-reflecting in order to stay with our plans.

Premise 4: Effective Development Plans are Based on Uniqueness

Effective development plans are based on one’s own uniqueness and on the uniqueness—the essences—of the systems intended to be developed. They include processes for a new form of reflection, not feedback, which builds uniqueness.

PREMISE 5: Projection is a Limiter in Feedback Processes

It is imperative to develop processes to overcome the universal tendency to project one’s own thinking onto others by developing in ourselves high levels of the capability for self-reflection, including consciousness in the moment of inner thoughts and emotions.

Most feedback from outside a system creates runaway by maximizing a part or an element at the expense of the whole. In addition, people tend to make judgments and speak based on projections of their own dysfunctional elements rather than reality outside themselves. When groups or individuals provide feedback for other groups or individuals, they tend to collude unknowingly in group projections.

Aesop told a tale about projection in which he described two burdens or two bags that each one of us carries, one on our back and one in front of us. The bag on our back is full of our limitations and defects, what we can’t see. The one in front is all the defects of other people, which are very visible. We can always see the bag in front, others’ shortfalls and failings, but we can’t be certain which bag we’ve got facing which way. Sometimes we switch the bag full of our own limitations to the front and mistake it for the failings of others.

Cognitive psychology understands this practice well and has named it projection. Frequently psychologists seek to understand their clients based on what they describe as the faults they see in others or the changes they think others should make. Many—most!—of our judgments about other people tend to be projections that reveal or own limits and defects—and even our strengths.

Without development, our capability for self-reflection tends to be severely limited, and unfortunately it is difficult to see this in ourselves and to know when we are projecting. Without the ability to know our thoughts and emotions in the moment, to monitor our reactions to others and process out our projections, our feedback to others can damage teams and hinder cross-functional processes. At the very least it can limit our capability to realize our potential and the potential of our organizations.

How is it that good people who would never intentionally deceive themselves find it so difficult to distinguish their projections from reality? Physicist and Nobel laureate David Bohm has provided an explanation for this. Based on his research, he suggests that we need to learn to differentiate between thinking and thought. Thought is made up of ideas that we hold in memory from often repeated or highly emotional experiences. Our thoughts are powerful presences in our minds and mental processing; often they shut out ideas that might help us develop alternative views of current situations. Bohm describes thoughts as highly active participants in the interpretation of events but ones that provide us only with old, preset interpretations. They cannot tell us how things are now, only what was true once upon a time, in historical situations, but not the same as what is happening now. When thoughts have the upper hand, we don’t think. Instead we are thought by our own history.

Bohm also points out that we rarely feel. Rather, we have felts that are part of our recorded history in the same way that thoughts are. Thoughts and felts are stored in our neural networks and they are retriggered whenever anything remotely similar to past experience appears to our minds. Instead of assisting our understanding, they cloud our sensations and perceptions, and limit our ability to respond creatively to what is new and exciting.

This is depressing news, but it’s not the last word on human potential. Moving from thoughts and felts to thinking and feeling is fundamental to developing self-accountability and to understanding the nature of feedback in the form of questions as a source of change.

Following is Chris’s post verbatim.

Marketing guru (blogger, author, etc.) Seth Godin posted a provocative blog entry called, “No such thing as business ethics”, in which he worries that the focus on “business ethics and corporate social responsibility” is distracting us from questions of personal responsibility:

It comes down to this: only people can have ethics. Ethics, as in, doing the right thing for the community even though it might not benefit you or your company financially….

Now I could quibble with Godin’s definition of ethics, which is actually a particular controversial view about what ethics requires, rather than a definition. But instead I’m going to take issue with Godin’s claim that all that matters in business is personal ethics, rather than organizational ethics. Godin writes:

I worry that we absolve ourselves of responsibility when we talk about business ethics and corporate social responsibility. Corporations are collections of people, and we ought to insist that those people (that would be us) do the right thing. Business is too powerful for us to leave our humanity at the door of the office. It’s not business, it’s personal.

Godin’s claim that “it’s not business, it’s personal” is problematic in two ways. First, it wrongly implies that business ethics somehow misses out on the whole personal integrity thing. That’s entirely false. Both the academic literature on business ethics and the “ethics and values” programs set up by individual companies put a lot of emphasis on individuals adopting the right values and making good decisions. Secondly, contrary to what Godin implies, individual ethics clearly is not enough. For one thing, people embedded in organizations have obligations that are role-specific. Just as lawyers and doctors have special duties that go along with their roles — they have to follow not just their own consciences, but also highly specific professional codes — so do people in the world of business. And for another thing, organizations can be set up badly such that all kinds of “good” individual decisions can still lead to problematic outcomes. The ethics of the organization, per se, matters a lot.

Interestingly, Godin tells us that he learned about all this from his dad. Unfortunately, while the homely lessons we learned at our parents’ knees tend to give us a good start in life, complex institutional settings tend to bring more complex duties, and hence require more complex principles.

And here is my response to Chris:

Boy, do I agree with you. Especially since the Supreme Court slants in the direction of treating corporations persons. I suggest that both individuals and businesses rely on explicit statements of beliefs and principles about what is “right” in order not to miss it when it shows up. For corporations and organizations I call them Social and Planetary Imperatives. These are statements the organization commits to as a whole. Everyone involved must discuss and draw conclusions about what makes everything they affect healthy and vital. It’s not possible to be ethical in the abstract. Ethics are all about enabling living entities to be whole and evolving.

The same is true for individuals. We have no system through which people learn how life works, whether human or biota. So we cannot know what is right simply by learning it from someone else. We have to participate intentionally in the formation of our ethics over our whole lives.

What Godin is right about it that CSR programs distract us from ethical behavior. In far too many instances it is their programmatic nature, for individuals and the business as a whole, which is based not on creating health but only on doing less harm. They leave out questions of human trafficking and healthy and vital communities.

The same is true at the individual level. Teachers no longer have time, authority, or even skill in many cases, for growing healthy beings (critical thinking skills, personal development) and so they just try to get them through the system (pass the standardized tests). Bard College is proving that developing whole beings, even ones who have been incarcerated for many years, is far more successful than training them in job skills. Our schools and businesses fail people by not developing them as whole, healthy, unique individuals.

Most of the programs for CSR just adopt the methods of the classroom and compound the problem. The system is broken at both levels, individual and organization. Even so, it’s not the trade-off of one for the other, individual or organization, but the lack of capability and systems thinking in both cases. Fragmented approaches and working from “do less harm” are the real distractions.

Premise 1: Self-governing Behavior is Energy Effective

The foundational element in effective human systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self-accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect human behavior from the outside, by others, is wasted energy that could be better used to improve the system and its people. In human systems it is critical to continuously increase self-governing capability.

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

The capability to be self-correcting or self-governing depends on the capability to be self-reflecting. Self-reflection is the observation and interpretation of one’s own internal processes for the purpose of restoring or maintaining homeostasis (internal balance and harmony with one’s environment) and creating heterostasis (evolution and change).

Premise 3:  Developmental Plans Are the Basis for Self-Reflection and Self-Governance

To become self-correcting—individually or as parts of teams—we must operate from development plans that we create for ourselves based on hierarchies of value and influence. Following these plans, we discover ways to express our own uniqueness (first-line work); we learn about ourselves and the joys and problems of working with others (second-line work); we search continuously for opportunities to make contributions to something greater than ourselves (third-line work). We optimize internal balance and maintain the capability to govern ourselves by continuously self-reflecting in order to stay with our plans.

Premise 4: Effective Development Plans are Based on Uniqueness

Effective development plans are based on one’s own uniqueness and on the uniqueness—the essences—of the systems intended to be developed. They include processes for a new form of reflection, not feedback, which builds uniqueness.

Development plans are contracts with one’s self and between one’s self and the organizations and teams that specify the principles and arenas within which one works. Reflection should be based only on these contracts and should come in the form of questions that increase self-reflection and self-governance in service to the aims of the plan established by person for him or herself. These aims are designed to evolve the uniqueness and distinctiveness of co-creators as they discover the contributions they seek to make. Holistic, optimizing reflection comes almost exclusively from within oneself as the result of intrinsic reflections. Feedback from others tends to be maximizing and to invite runaway.

Development plans vastly reduce the probability of runaway and optimize the development of self-reflection and self-governance. When persons or systems work according to plans they, themselves, have designed, they interpret information they gather and convert it into optimizing understanding and utility. The plan offers a whole context within which information can be used as the basis for individual growth and the growth of ultimate beneficiaries (customers and other stakeholders).

Without development plans, information is more likely to be interpreted based on ego needs, which makes optimizing difficult. No part of a living system can truly manage its own behavior without reference to individual participants and beneficiaries, which ensure the vitality and viability of the whole.

Reflection for Others in the Form of Questions

The kind of questioning proposed here is the lost art of the Socratic tradition. This art is frowned upon in much of American culture because it assumes that in order to learn we must first acknowledge that we are ignorant, that we don’t have all the answers. This seems to run counter to developmental measures, which offer many ways to assess the quality and validity of answers. It contradicts the standard pedagogies and popular game shows that reward participants for memorizing answers. Questions are the sources of newness and regeneration and yet we spend 99 percent of our lives acquiring answers and the ability to get more answers. There are almost no processes for learning to develop generative questions ourselves or to assess the quality of others’.

A profound test of the value of questions in human development can be seen in a program developed at the University of Arizona for helping educators deal with “slow” learners. The program worked on developing higher order thinking skills (HOTS) based on use of the Socratic Method, guiding learning by posing questions rather than supplying answers. The focus was on developing children’s capabilities rather than stuffing them with knowledge.

Most of the children who participated in the HOTS program were considered to be remedial or at-risk learners. Their results were remarkable: 10 percent were reclassified as gifted at the end of the first year; 36 percent had earned and retained a position on their schools’ honor rolls. Of four students ranked as the top academic learners in one school, two were HOTS participants who had risen from the bottom of their classes. Participating students gained an average of 15 percent on standardized reading and math tests in one year, which raised them to 67 percent above the national average in reading and 123 percent above the national average in math. Teachers also noted significant improvement in every student’s self-concept. Students reported that they felt increasing confidence in their ability to succeed at levels significantly beyond those they originally felt capable of achieving. After one year a tough inner-city school no longer had any discipline problems with any of its students enrolled in the HOTS program.

Transfer this to a business setting and you can quickly see the power of working from a new assessment model based on open-ended questions designed to guide exploration and discovery. The HOTS statistics would translate to an increase in workforce capability 67-123 percent faster than the competition’s. Half of the major promotions into new, more challenging positions would be people considered unpromotable or “topped out.” Workers formerly considered discipline problems would become fascinated, committed, and self-disciplined contributors.

Thus businesses and teams would be far better served by training in question development or question posing than they are by solely focusing on the communication of established ideas and facts. Posing questions that stimulate both the asker and asked to come up with open-ended answers creates much different environments than questions to which we know the answers (the kinds of questions that parents and teachers routinely ask) or those we ask when we expect others to give us a known answer that we can pass on to others (questions that bosses and employees ask each other). The HOTS program is a powerful model from which businesses could learn a great deal, including primarily the value of questions over answers for the purpose of creating Learning Organizations or Developmental Organizations (Sanford 1993).

Premise 1: Self-governing Behavior is Energy Effective

The foundational element in effective human systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self-accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect human behavior from the outside, by others, is wasted energy that could be better used to improve the system and its people. In human systems it is critical to continuously increase self-governing capability.

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

The capability to be self-correcting or self-governing depends on the capability to be self-reflecting. Self-reflection is the observation and interpretation of one’s own internal processes for the purpose of restoring or maintaining homeostasis (internal balance and harmony with one’s environment) and creating heterostasis (evolution and change).

Premise 3:  Developmental Plans Are the Basis for Self-Reflection and Self-Governance

To become self-correcting—individually or as parts of teams—we must operate from development plans that we create for ourselves based on hierarchies of value and influence. Following these plans, we discover ways to express our own uniqueness (first-line work); we learn about ourselves and the joys and problems of working with others (second-line work); we search continuously for opportunities to make contributions to something greater than ourselves (third-line work). We optimize internal balance and maintain the capability to govern ourselves by continuously self-reflecting in order to stay with our plans.

Cybernetics theory tells us that isolating individual systems in order to correct imbalances inevitably leads to runaway. In human systems this happens most often as the result of well-intentioned processes based on feedback exclusively from external perspectives. Useful information—information unlikely to cause runaway—originates within systems in which people continuously produce value for others with whom they share reciprocal relationships. Producing genuine value for others always requires taking whole systems into account.

In the business world, the enlightened goal is to enrich the lives of customers and consumers who make use of the goods and services produced. At the same time, businesses also enrich the lives of all the other stakeholders in their endeavors. Within businesses individuals are able to determine what is likely to produce value for stakeholders and to develop within themselves the capabilities required to participate in making this contribution. This entails the use of self-reflection to garner self-understanding in order to grow oneself to be more effective. This self-generated, self-reflective process requires and enhances discovery and continuous self-reflection.

In businesses driving to creating responsible management systems, personal develop plans are based on personally set aims that require growth beyond a present state of being and capability. These aims are augmented when a person sees things that need improvement based on more ability to contribute what is unique to him or herself. Each individual sets aims to develop the ableness of the organization or business, the stakeholders affected by the business, and the work teams they are part of. They also set personal aims that they feel are required to meet these larger aims. In this way, a development plan includes three lines of work (on self, on how others work together, and in service to stakeholders).

Aims are not the same as traditional goals and objectives. They are intrinsic developmental paths that require a person to be, rather than just do something more effectively. For example, for a person to take on bigger challenges (the doing), they may need to learn to manage their reactivity to anything new (the being).

What is not developmental or responsible?

Several “categorizing feedback” methods currently in vogue seem to now be essential tools for training and development. In fact they tend not to be developmental in nature. The Myers-Briggs analysis, for example, and other models like it are usually presented as static typologies. They appear to invite better understanding of who we are but they offer no real way change or develop. They focus primarily on standardized and functional aspects of personality and discourage exploration of the uniqueness of individuals.

Relying on these models people come to believe that they are static—common and definable by external standards (“what I am”) rather than evolving (“what I am becoming or could become”). Within an organization, this kind of assessment, and the feedback attendant to it, contribute to a field of external judgments, which tends to limit seeing one other as more than the representatives of a type—and fixed in that type at that. The lives of real persons are reduced to boxes or ranks and individuals are robbed of their liveliness and their capacity to develop.

Premise 1: Self-governing Behavior is Energy Effective

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

The capability to be self-correcting or self-governing depends on the capability to be self-reflecting. Self-reflection is the observation and interpretation of one’s own internal processes for the purpose of restoring or maintaining homeostasis (internal balance and harmony with one’s environment) and creating heterostasis (evolution and change). 

Cybernetics theory tells us that mechanical systems seek and interpret information that is appropriate and necessary for optimizing themselves as wholes. They ignore all other information. It turns out that human beings have a similar drive to maintain wholeness and not to be diverted into behaviors that favor only parts of themselves and their living environments. In both humans and machines, nonessential information that is “forced” into the system in ways that prevent it from being disregarded causes oscillation—the inability to choose or proceed independently. Forced, nonessential information may also cause persons or machines to run away, to overcompensate or maximize focus on what is isolated and irrelevant. When repeated over time, oscillation and runaway produce increasing distortion and the deterioration of a system’s ability to rebalance or optimize.

Oscillation and runaway result when a system seeks to maximize variables rather than optimize whole-system functioning. In other words, they result when external influences override mechanical governors or human self-reflecting. For example, sometimes when someone repeatedly tells us not to do something that is hurting us, we refuse to stop doing it. The more they tell us, the more stubborn we become, and we may even escalate the harmful behavior.  Anyone who has been the parent of a teenager is familiar with runaway, and it is apparent in even very young children when advice takes the form of apparently essential instruction.

One scientific study I conducted in graduate school found that, by early school age, when children were given simple instructions for an activity and then constantly told whether they were doing it right, they lost their ability to correctly interpret whether they were actually following the instructions. Because they wanted to please adults and to do the activity right, the children claimed they were following the instructions even when they were not. Even after they were shown photos that clearly proved they weren’t, they stuck with their stories and insisted more vehemently that they were right, as they repeated behaviors proscribed by the instructions. However, when the same exercise was repeated several times without evaluation from adults and the children were left to reflect on the accuracy of their responses without external input, they became significantly better at judging their success accurately. The feedback from adults not only prevented self-assessment and trust in their own reflection; it exacerbated the behavior the adults were trying to stop.

In human systems, focusing on a portion of the whole without regard for its entirety or losing sight of elements that are “out of control” can cause diminished capacity. In other words, runaway cannot be maintained for extended periods of time without causing individuals to lose their ability to return to self-governing, self-correcting behaviors on their own.

In cases like this, it is essential to reintroduce self-reflection, using it to optimize the whole again. Otherwise the “learning and adapting ability” of the system is eroded. This loss of adapting is quite common when human auto-immune systems are challenged by chemotherapy in the treatment of cancer. Harsh chemicals—forced into the system and impossible to override—cause the body’s natural governing systems to become unable to determine which antibodies or types of blood cells to release and which to destroy.

When runaway occurs in an organization the tendency is to attempt to shift the focus of operating teams as fast as possible to each new out-of-control area. For example, correcting for changes in quality without regard for the whole operation can result in increases in costs. Correcting for increases in cost can cause changes in safety practices that throw the organization further out of balance. The resulting effect of segmented goal setting can be inability to get the whole back into balance.

Premise 1: Self-governing Behavior is Energy Effective

Premise 3: Developmental Plans Are the Basis for Self-Reflection and Self-Governance

Providing feedback to peers, subordinates, and even superiors—particularly the 360 Degree view of performance appraisal—became popular as scientists and engineers began to understand how cybernetic systems work in computer applications. The creators of these artificial intelligence systems discovered that feedback loops are critical for correcting and adjusting the performance of control mechanisms, such as thermostats and pressure gauges. Why not use them to improve the performance of people and organizations? 

Over the next week I will post a six-part series on the irresponsibility of feedback processes and the six premises on which feedback concepts are based and the fallacies in feedback as a practice. 

Metaphorical Mix-up

The metaphor inherent in the idea of feedback was suggestive of work processes that were characteristic of the new participative business cultures. To many business leaders it seemed logical that people could benefit from feedback. However, a misconception occurred in the transfer of the idea from one system to the other. This was the result of insufficient understanding of cybernetic (machine) principles and incorrect assumptions about likenesses between the systems under consideration—mechanical and human.

The fundamental differences between the two systems should be clear. One is that mechanical systems are closed, human systems are open. A closed system imports energy from its environment in a one-way dependency. An open system exchanges energy with the environment in ways that create symbiotic relationships. Machines are not interactive. They stop working when they aren’t given fuel; a car needs gasoline, a furnace requires oil, a lamp needs electricity. Human beings, on the other hand, work in reciprocal maintenance relationships that can be appropriately balanced. These relationships connect systems to one another in living processes that, intentionally or not, affect the survival of each. Married couples, customers and suppliers, citizens and governments, for example, are alive, interdependent, and dynamically interrelated.

The misconception that arose when feedback loops were applied to human systems involved the different ways humans and machines gain and use feedback. Sometimes a mechanism called a “governor” is installed into machinery to make adaptation possible. The governor “senses” the mechanical system’s excursion outside of pre-specified boundaries. For instance, a thermostat senses when heat production exceeds a preset temperature. A governor uses feedback—information about deviation from preset standards—to change the operation of the machinery, bringing it back into conformance.

In the case of human systems and voluntary human behaviors, there are no requirements for information from external governors. Individuals have the capacity to observe for themselves that particular behaviors have gone out of bounds. What values they place on these behaviors and what creative responses they require from themselves are a matter of development. Human responses are far more complex than mechanical adjustments. There are no specifiable good or bad designs in the working of people and organizations.

Also, humans do not have the same clear boundaries with their environments that machines do. In any given instance it isn’t evident who is controlling and affecting what. Further, human thinking and emotion include living entities that must be taken into account. Humans engage in interpreting their environments, sensing the state of other living systems, and observing themselves as they reflect and take action. These processes provide a different capacity for self-management than is available to machinery and other closed systems.

Because these differences between human and mechanical systems are not taken into account, there are many fundamental flaws in the logic that introduces feedback into organizations moving toward increasingly participative workforces and more self-managing teamwork. Here I’ll explore some of the premises behind self-accountability within organizations and the ways feedback can hinder its development. Theories from cybernetic and living systems science will provide some valuable insights by contrast and comparison.

Working With Human Nature Instead of Against It

The creation of organization designs sufficient to the rapidly changing world of industry requires creating a new set of operating processes based on paradigms or premises true to human nature. These new processes must be different from even the current popular models offered by advanced work design. Noted general semanticist Alfred Korzybski has said, “No system [design] which disregards or violates ‘human nature’ can possibly survive.” 

The paradigms offered here are based on an understanding of human nature that is primarily developmental in philosophy and drawn from living systems and the sciences of complexity. The story of human behavior from a developmental perspective—one that operates from the potential of people versus the managing of variances and disorder in human behavior—offers a set of interrelated premises that herald new approaches to organization.  

 Premise 1: Self-Governing Behavior is Energy Effective

The foundational element in effective human systems is self-correcting, self-managing, self-accountable, self-governing behavior. Energy spent on monitoring and attempting to affect human behavior from the outside, by others, is wasted energy that could be better used to improve the system and its people. In human systems it is critical to continuously increase self-governing capability.

In Western culture we have systematically instilled ways of working that erode self-accountability. First our parents, then our teachers, and then our employers/bosses tell us what to do, how we are doing in our performance, what our grade or rank is, or to what degree our behavior is correct. This is feedback from external controllers. Because is so embedded in our way of operating, it is hard for us to see how pervasive it is and that it works against the creation of self-governing, self-accountable human beings.

Even in machine systems theory, a machine’s governor or self-correcting mechanism is built in, not operating independently from the outside. From inside the system, it identifies differences or changes that exist throughout and signals that the whole system is not operating optimally. In an internally managed, self-correcting manner, this causes changes that return the system to an ideal or optimum state based on defined parameters. Thus feedback from external controllers—parents, teachers, bosses—is not an accurate extrapolation from the cybernetics theory of mechanical feedback loops.

Most organizations assume that humans cannot be self-governing or self-auditing because they cannot be objective about themselves. Even with complex mental functioning and the ability to make choices, humans are assumed to be less able to self-regulate than complex machinery. This is not innately true of us but it often becomes true. Unless developed from childhood, the capacity to be self-reflecting (self-observing and self-remembering) steadily diminishes. This is particularly true when a person’s primary source of reflection is external (from others’ interpretations of our actions) and when feedback focuses on elements that tend to pull us away from what feels intrinsically self-integrating.

A familiar example provides a good understanding of this. Often when a person we respect advises us not to take a particular course of action, our internal sense disagrees. When we take the advice instead of listening to ourselves—however the situation turns out—we lose a sense of integrity with our own course of development. We humans have a strong desire to feel integrity between our values and our behavior, even when it means “learning the hard way.” When we repeatedly act against our own judgment or intuition, following the advice of others, we lose our inner sense of reality. We become indecisive and unsure of ourselves. In extreme cases we may even become mentally ill.

By viewing humans developmentally—as though each one of us is working to unveil our own potential and contribution—it is possible to understand how we use self-reflection to increase self-regulating behavior. Reflecting on the thoughts and emotions that are the impetus for particular behaviors provides us with internally developed feedback. It alerts us to the degree of adherence we are maintaining to our inner selves as we attempt to achieve particular aims. This nature of reflection tells us what behaviors are optimizing and integrating for us.

We sometimes forget that what we think needs changing in another person may not be critical from their perspective. What works for one person does not necessarily work for another. This is a core life exercise in the development of self-accountability—discovering what works for us, what demands higher discipline, what benefits from flexibility, and what will be helpful from others.

The primary sources for alternative management have come from business schools, the consultants who serve industry (many from universities), and the published works of professors and consultants. The majority of this work is based on an underlying philosophy that came to business by way of behavioral psychology. This behavioral approach to business is uniquely American and had its birth and nurturing beginning in the first third of this century. It is also the basis of most of our child rearing theory.

Behaviorism promises to supply both the fundamental laws governing all human activity and the fundamental science of human affairs by which to ensure the control of people (Danziger 1979). Thus in the U.S. behaviorism has become the primary—in fact the only—school or philosophy of human psychological research. While other nations are learning to take a broader perspective on human nature, business here has been spoon fed the singular philosophy of behavior modification, which is now becoming embedded in the new generation of work-team design. The behaviorist model, which works on understanding how to correct behavior that is considered disorderly, offers techniques that tend to work against the core capability of self-accountability.

Premise 2: Self-governance Depends on the Capability to Self-reflect

Premise 3: Developmental Plans Are the Basis for Self-Reflection and Self-Governance

Premises 4-6 will be posted within the next week or two.

Premise 4: Effective Development Plans are Based on Uniqueness

Premise 5: Projection is a Limiter in Feedback Processes

Premise 6: Develop Change Holistically