Egyptian leaders have finally met with protestors. Not much has changed. What jumped out in the headlines today was Mubarak’s assertion that the protests are stimulated and fueled by outsiders. The country would not have all these problems if outsiders would just leave them alone. My post won’t offer a different way to understand these particular events. Instead I’ll talk about what’s behind an interpretation like Mubarak’s.
I see it as one more example, this time a highly visible one, of the lack of capability to see what is producing patterns of behavior, and limited understanding of how to transform these patterns. The issue is capability. What makes the lack of capability obvious is the strategy used to explain things. Blame! Blaming others is the source of much turmoil where humans are involved. And it is what makes it so difficult to learn and work collectively to produce a better planet and society.
Coincidently, Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times today is a scathing critique of Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, Known and Unknown. Dowd’s take is that the entire book is a recitation of who is to blame for everything that went wrong under Rumstud’s (George W’s pet name for Rumsfeld) and George W. Bush’s watch.
I have to admit that I go nearly crazy when people create blame stories. It’s such a sad way to view the world and it makes it so difficult for us to work together to solve the really big problems. Another current example is the claim that climate change is a hoax, fomented by one group to rip off a smaller, powerless group. Blame also shows up in businesses that are suffering. We foist our dissatisfaction on one another. Someone else is always the source of the problem.
I am catholic about my concern with this saga of blame. I often observe environmentalists who are dogmatic about their ways to reverse harm and save the planet and who spend a of lot of time gathering evidence to pin blame on someone for the problems. Not that there is no fault to be found in the actions of others and no need to talk about it. But I have never found that the blame model of working produces anything of real value. I continually remind myself that in all of these cases, the opportunity is capability, and the real source of our problems is the lack thereof.
My premise is that responsibility—which includes making the right decisions, building bridges across conflicting ideas, bringing turmoil to order, and elevating businesses to make holistic decisions that have no trade-offs—cannot develop unless we build the capability to think better and to see more precisely the underlying sources of problems and opportunities. By this I mean, to think systemically about the working of complex dynamics in situations; to learn to see the effects of our actions and manage own behaviors and language; to value what others are seeing and know that there is much more overlap than contradiction and that we can build on this.
The divide-and-blame model is based on a false notion that the world is made of polarities, a notion that the news media fosters and that leaves us thinking there are only two sides to every story, when in fact there are no sides, but there are many dynamics.
Capability takes two forms or works from two directions, intrinsically and externally. External capability is to see systems at work and their patterns. It is also recognizing the nodes where intervention is possible, where we can make great changes with little effort. This might be called the acupuncture mode of working. Intrinsically, capability is awareness of own thoughts and how they are causing us to interpret events, the ability to see the effects of our behavior and how our own attachments and shortfalls cause us to be less effective, and to know that these change when consciousness is introduced.
Let me give you a business example of how working responsibly becomes fairly straightforward when a group spends time building capability to think systemically. Colgate Palmolive, Europe spent several years building capability in advance of the merging of countries into the European Common Market. At the outset there had been nine business units in nine countries with nine different governing organizations—and twelve distinct languages. The European businesses were restructuring and were expected to close many facilities and eliminate many jobs. They were not off to a good start and many errors were being made in efforts to market, sell, ship, and manufacture across national boundaries. These were costing Colgate millions of dollars (this was pre-Euro). The president of Europe and other leaders spent much of their time refereeing the blame that was advanced between countries.
Chuck Beck, the manufacturing EVP for Colgate, Europe had traveled with a team of executives to observe business systems at Kingsford Charcoal and had seen how effective they were. On that trip, he decided that his country-leaders needed to have more capability in intrinsic self-management and better extrinsic ability to understand dynamics they were experiencing in their markets and nations. He established a two-year development processes that led to significant changes in capability across Europe. This included critical thinking skills based on Regenerative Systems Thinking methodologies. The two-year series build strong personal and group reflective abilities to get beyond reactivity and work instead from purposes that were more encompassing than those from which they had started. With a charter to ensure that everyone was able to come out whole, they restructured work in ways that led to new businesses, very few lost jobs, and relationships that supported the idea of a united Europe.
Colgate, Europe might have tried to stick with the blame-based negotiation method they had begun with, which had caused individuals, teams, and nations to feel at odds with one another and encouraged keeping score of others’ missteps. Instead, the teams shifted their thinking to the whole of Europe and Colgate’s leadership role. From the perspective of the whole, there was no one to blame when things went wrong.
Colgate participated in and developed processes for educating, sharing, and supporting rapid change. This shifted their market position in Europe to #1 in most of the categories they played in. Some observers believe that it also created the platform that national leaders used to demonstrate how Europe could be united. Many of Colgate’s managers and even some individual contributors spoke about their experience in political settings and took on work to help bring about unity.
It isn’t common but there are examples to show how building capability can change the game in business and governance. There are also a handful of writers, leaders, and organizations who understand that we often ask people, including national leaders, to take on challenges to which they cannot possibly rise—because they don’t have the capability to take the “whole” into account and cannot even conceive of its complexity.
In Wednesday’s post, I’ll take a look at one of these thought leaders—Matthew E. May, author of The Shibumi Strategy—whose work highlights intrinsic capabilities.
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